Armenian History and the Question of Genocide by Michael M. Gunter (review)

The 100th anniversary of the initiation of the Armenian Genocide offers an opportune time to review Michael Gunter’s latest arguments that the mass deaths that the destruction of most of the Armenian community of the Ottoman Empire did not constitute genocide. The work under review offers neither a re-reading of the now-vast secondary literature nor a fresh study of previously misunderstood or unknown archival documentation (the author seems unequipped linguistically for the latter task). Rather, it offers yet one more return to the argument that Robert Melson aptly criticized as the “provocation thesis.”

This thesis assigns responsibility for the mass deaths to both the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) that then led the Ottoman State, and the Armenian revolutionaries who had been seeking autonomy within the Empire. The latter, in this argument, figure as provocateurs: Armenian radicals and nationalists in thrall to their Russian masters. Indeed, in Gunter’s reading little blame falls to the CUP—it applies rather to the general coarseness of Ottoman governance.

“Without whitewashing what happened to the Armenians,” Gunter promises “an objective analysis of the Turkish point of view on the subject” (p. ix). Rather early on, however, he announces that his study will draw on the writings of Jacques Sémelin, Hovhannes Katchaznouni (first prime minister of independent Armenia, 1918−1919), and K.S. Papazian, whom he rather generously labels a historian. None of these three, however, has in fact produced work that can be used fruitfully to examine the Genocide or its afterlife, although Sémelin, a serious scholar, has written about political manipulation of the issue of genocide in general.

Yet anyone inclined to expect that the present book is an “apology” for Turkey, or even a new contribution to the field of studies denying that there was an Armenian Genocide (for what I consider to be a thoroughly unconvincing recent example of the latter, see Sean McMeekin’s 2011 The Russian Origins of the First World War), the author states that “it is not! Rather I read this book as an attempt to show how the Armenians have misused the term ‘genocide’ for their one-sided political agenda and that while the Turks committed many horrible acts that today might be called war crimes or ethnic cleansing, the Armenians were not completely innocent” (p. 10).

In chapter 1 Gunter presents both the Turkish and Armenian “positions.” Prior to the emergence of exclusive nationalism in the late nineteenth century, the Armenian community lived in security as a “loyal nation” (Millet-i Sadika) under Ottoman rule. The new nationalism led to the attendant rise of various “radical” political organizations, especially the Hunchaks and later the Dashnaks. These groups, in Gunter’s view, resorted to violent, even terrorist, actions against the Ottoman authorities, which helped undermine the stable, if unequal, system of relations regulating life in the Empire. Indeed Gunther, an erstwhile expert on “Armenian terrorism,” begins his historical discussion of the modern “Armenian Question” with the actions of tiny bands of actual Armenian terrorists in the 1970s and 1980s—more on this later. A century-plus ago Armenian efforts to further enfeeble the Ottoman regime were greatly aided by Russia with “the Armenians” supporting—especially at the beginning of the First World War—the now existential enemy, the Russian Empire.

The result, according to the author, was that 600,000 Armenians died during deportations from strategic areas. Disastrous for the Armenian community to be sure, but genocide no. Gunter’s second chapter contains both a straightforward reading of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, and a case for why the Armenian killings in 1915−1916 (not to mention over the following several years) are not congruent with that definition. They were not intentional; no rational planning or organization can be espied. “One might instead conclude that the huge task of relocating hundreds of thousands of Armenians in a short period … and over a highly primitive system of...