Debating the Armenian Massacres in the Last Ottoman Parliament, November – December 1918

Fig. 1.

The Ottoman parliament building near the Istanbul seafront, photographed in November 1918 when allied battle ships were anchored in front of the parliament.

Fig. 2.

'Bu da geçer Yâhû' (O God, this too shall pass!), by the famous calligrapher Tuğrakeş İsmail Hakk| (1873-1946), from the Sufi perception of the transitory nature of everything, good or bad. This was displayed in his shop window during the occupation years, 1918-22. It rapidly became a slogan of national resistance and began to decorate all shop windows belonging to Muslim/Turkish tradesmen.

No serious historian of the nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist, except in the sense of believers in the literal truth of the Scriptures, while unable to make contributions to evolutionary theory, are not precluded from making contributions to archaeology and Semitic philology. Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.

Eric Hobsbawm¹

Introduction

Perhaps the question 'what happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915?' is deceptively simple. Certainly, the answer is far from straightforward; it is becoming progressively more politically encumbered and is now polarized into two distinct and uncompromising discourses. The first of these was set up by a group of Turkish nationalist historians and their foreign colleagues in the early 1980s. They argued that during World War One the Ottoman Armenians staged an armed uprising in Eastern Anatolia and collaborated with the invading Russian army. Hence the Young Turks in power known as İttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti (the Committee of Union and Progress, hereafter the CUP) in Istanbul decided to 'relocate' the Armenian population to deserts in Syria and Iraq. According to this narrative, the decision for relocation should be interpreted simply as a strategic measure to secure the rear of the Ottoman Army fighting against the Russians on the Eastern front. One of the major proponents of this 'official thesis', was the late Ambassador Kamuran Gürün. According to him:

Various deaths occurred for various reasons during the relocation. Some of the deaths were due to epidemics, some were due to climatic factors, some were due to the hardships suffered during the journey, some were due to attacks, because officials did not protect them or because officials engaged in illegal acts . . . Many others died while fighting against the Turks in the Russian Army which they joined as volunteers.²

Naturally this mode of reasoning tried to minimize the death toll of Armenians, and justify as 'collateral' the nature of the subsequent deaths during these massive deportations. Gürün also estimated conservatively that 'the number of casualties of the Armenians of Turkey, for all reasons, did not exceed 300,000'.³ However, alternative opinions suggest a figure not less than 900,000.

Taking these 'facts' as the main premise of analysis, a corpus of 'semiofficial' literature proliferated in Turkey from the early 1980s, which shared a common narrative structure.⁴ Central to this structure was the unquestioned belief that Muslims and Christians had lived peacefully together within the Ottoman millet system until it collapsed in the second half of nineteenth century. This collapse was, to a large extent, the fault of the Great Powers who intervened in the domestic affairs of the Ottoman Empire and exploited the position of the non-Muslim minorities living there. Later, the Armenian revolutionary elites, captivated by the false promises of self-determination and independence, took up arms and organized rebellions against the Sultan. Finally, during World War One the Armenians sided with the invading Russian army and consequently had to be deported to Syria and Iraq.

Next, this defensive line of argument against the 'allegations of the so-called Armenian genocide' was replaced with a new and intensified counter-offensive. In the last decade, a group of state-sponsored Turkish historians have argued that it was actually the Muslim population of Anatolia which was massacred by Armenians and subjected to genocide. In order to prove this point, they exhumed 'newly discovered mass...