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ARTICLES

Late Ottoman genocides: the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish population and extermination policies—introduction

Pages 7-14 | Published online: 19 Jun 2008
 

Notes

1. The Ottoman campaign against the Armenians in Ourfa was led by Eberhard Count Wolffskeel Von Reichenberg. The historian Hilmar Kaiser has pointed out that Wolffskeel's role was insofar exceptional, as he seemed to be the only German officer serving in the Ottoman army who directly participated in massacres against Armenians. On the events in Ourfa in October 1915, see Eberhard Count Wolffskeel Von Reichenberg, Zeitoun, Mousa Dagh, Ourfa: Letters on the Armenian Genocide, edited and introduced by Hilmar Kaiser (Princeton, NJ: Talderon Press, 2001), pp 20–29.

2. Jakob Künzler, Im Lande des Blutes und der Tränen. Erlebnisse in Mesopotamien während des Weltkrieges (1914–1918) (Potsdam: Tempel-Verlag, 1921).

3. Jakob Künzler, Im Lande des Blutes und der Tränen. Erlebnisse in Mesopotamien während des Weltkrieges (1914–1918), edited and introduced by Hans-Lukas Kieser (Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 1999), p 103.

4. Künzler, Im Lande, p 101f. On Künzler's relationship with the Kurds, see Hans-Lukas Kieser, “‘Birader Yakup’, ein ‘Arzt ohne Grenzen’ in Urfa, und seine Wahlverwandtschaft mit den Kurden (1899–1922),” Kurdische Studien, Vol 1, No 1 (2001), pp 91–120.

5. Ibid, p 102.

6. On Young Turk social engineering in Eastern Turkey from 1913 to 1950, see Uğur Ümit Üngör's article in this issue.

7. Mark Levene claims that the overt genocidal motivation of the Young Turks is hard to prove in the case of the Kurds due to insufficient documentation. Mark Levene, “Creating a modern ‘zone of genocide’: the impact of nation- and state-formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol 12, No 3 (1998), pp 393–433. David McDowall states that the Young Turkish leadership has never advertised its plan of forced assimilation. See David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), p 105.

8. McDowall, Modern History of the Kurds, p 105f.

9. On the perception of the Kurds as brutal murderers of the Anatolian Christians in German literature until 1945, see Dominik J. Schaller, “‘Armenische Krämer’ und ‘kurdische Mordbrenner’: Armenisch-kurdische Beziehungen und ihre Wahrnehmung in Deutschland bis in die 1940er Jahre,” in Kurdische Studien, Vol 3, Nos 1–2 (2003), pp 5–32.

10. Jelle Verheij, “Die armenischen Massaker von 1894–1896. Anatomie und Hintergründe einer Krise,” in: Hans-Lukas Kieser, ed., Die armenische Frage und die Schweiz (1896–1923) (Zürich: Chronos-Verlag, 1999), pp 69–129. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide. Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford Univerity Press, 2005), pp 51–57.

11. On the rescue of Armenians by Alevis, see the report by the US missionary Riggs: Henry H. Riggs, Days of Tragedy in Armenia. Personal Experiences in Harpoot, 1915–1917, edited and introduced by Ara Sarafian (Ann Arbor, MI: Gomidas, 1997), pp 108–117. The Kurds of the Dersim had to pay a high price for their courage. Riggs noted in his report: “One distressing incident which followed the uprising of the Kurds in the Dersim was the effort on the part of the Turkish government to terrorize those Kurds by treating them as they had treaded the Armenians.” Ibid, p 183.

12. The historian David McDowall calls it a “grim irony” that the Kurds participated in the murder of the Armenians without knowing the Young Turks' plans for themselves. See McDowall, Modern History of the Kurds, p 105.

13. On the persecution of Hutu in Burundi, see René Lemarchand, Burundi. Ethnic Conflict and Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

14. See, for example, the contributions in Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York: Berghahn, 1999).

15. Christian Gerlach, “Extremely violent societies: an alternative to the concept of genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol 8, No 4 (2006), pp 455–471, see especially p 464.

16. Dominik J. Schaller, “From the editor: judges and politicians as historians?,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol 9, No 1 (2007), pp 1–4.

17. The label “first modern genocide” has no scientific value at all. It implies that all genocides before World War I, namely, colonial genocides, would be insignificant for a global history of modern genocide. See Jürgen Zimmerer, “Kolonialer Genozid? Vom Nutzen und Nachteil einer historischen Kategorie für eine Globalgeschichte des Völkermordes,” in Dominik J. Schaller et al., eds., Enteignet-Vertrieben-Ermordet. Beiträge zur Genozidforschung (Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 2004), pp 109–128.

18. Roger W. Smith, for example, sees the murder of the Armenians as a paradigmatic case of genocide: “The Armenian Genocide is particularly instructive in that it is the prototype for much of the genocides in the twentieth century and the new millennium.” Roger W. Smith, “The significance of the Armenian genocide after ninety years,” Genocide Studies and Prevention, Vol 1, No 2 (2006), pp I–IV. On the discussion of the comparison between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, see the contributions in Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik J. Schaller, eds, The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah (Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 2002).

19. Pro-Armenian associations and missionary societies in the USA managed to attract considerable attention for the fate of the Armenians already during the Hamidian massacres of 1894–96 and especially during World War I. On their lobby activities, see Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris. The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (New York: HarperCollins, 2003); Jay Winter, ed., America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

20. On how the Holocaust contributes to a universalistic morality, see Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).

21. Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, reedited by Ara Sarafian (Ann Arbor, MI: Talderon Press, 2000), p 214.

22. See Matthias Bjørnlund's article in this issue. It is noteworthy that the Young Turks had resorted to massive violence against Christian communities before. Thousands of Greeks, Serbs and Bulgarians were killed in Macedonia between 1909 and 1911. These atrocities were, however, carried out in a less systematic way than the ones from 1914 onwards. The former US consul to Smyrna, George Horton, described these massacres as such in his report dating from 1926: “This persecution first displaced itself in the form of sporadic murders of alarming frequency all over Macedonia the victims being, in the beginning, notables of the various Christian communities. A favourite place for shooting these people was at their doorsteps at the moment of their return home. It became evident that the Turkish Government, in order to gain control of the territory, was bent upon the extermination of the non-Mussulman leaders. […] From the extermination of notables, the program extended to people of less importance, who began to disappear.” George Horton, The Blight of Asia. An Account of the Systematic Extermination of Christian Populations by Mohammedans and of the Culpability of Certain Great Powers; with the True Story of the Burning of Smyrna, reedited by Ara Sarafian (Reading: Talderon Press, 2003), pp 16–17.

23. This is one of the key points in Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred. Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

24. In historiography, the fate of Christian co-victims of Armenians and Greeks has only recently been dealt with. See David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim–Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006); Hannibal Travis, “‘Native Christians massacred’: the Ottoman genocide of Assyrians during World War I,” Genocide Studies and Prevention, Vol 1, No 3 (2006), pp 327–371; Tessa Hofmann, ed., Verfolgung, Vertreibung und Vernichtung der Christen im Osmanischen Reich, 1912–1922 (Münster: Lit-Verlag, 2004).

25. Reshid's roots were Circassian. His family had been expelled from the Russian Caucasus. He was thus also a victim that became a perpetrator. On Reshid, see Hans-Lukas Kieser, “Dr. Mehmed Reshid (1873–1919): a political doctor,” in Kieser and Schaller, The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah, pp 245–280.

26. Ambassador Hohenlohe-Langeburg to Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, July 31, 1915, quoted in Johannes Lepsius, ed., Deutschland und Armenien 1914–1918: Sammlung diplomatischer Aktenstücke (Potsdam: Tempel-Verlag, 1919), document 126.

27. Assyrian lobby groups and organizations are far from being as successful as their Armenian counterparts. The following excerpts of a public letter to Sylvester Stallone published on the website of the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA) illustrate the Assyrians' frustration: “I have read that you are going to produce a film based on Franz Werfel's novel ‘The Forty Days of Musa Dagh’ which deals with the Armenian Genocide. […] The purpose of my letter is to appeal to you Mr. Stallone to mention in your new film also the Genocide perpetrated against the Assyrian people. […] Since the Genocides against the Assyrians and Armenians were carried out at the same time, it would be a sin not to include the sufferings of the Assyrians in your film.” Available at http://www.aina.org/guesteds/20070207115546.pdf (accessed January 9, 2008).

28. Yair Auron, The Banality of Indifference. Zionism and the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2000), pp 59–99.

29. Hilmar Kaiser, “The Ottoman government and the end of Ottoman social formation, 1915–1917.” The essay is published in the internet, available at http://www.hist.net/kieser/aghet/Essays/EssayKaiser.html (accessed January 9, 2008).

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