The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 by Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi (review)

In their 656-page tome that includes more than 2,700 endnotes, Israeli scholars Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi argue that Turkey perpetrated a continuing 30-year genocide against its large Christian minorities of Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians in three steps: 1) Sultan Abdülhamid II's massacres of allegedly up to 300,000 Armenians in 1894–96 (p. 132); 2) The Armenian massacres in 1915 and during World War I that have been called genocide by many; and 3) the final onslaughts by the army of Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk) against mainly Greeks from 1919 to 1924. The purpose of this 30-year-long genocide was supposedly to reduce Turkey's large Christian minority of some 20 percent of its population to less than 2 percent by 1924 (much less today) in order to create a homogeneous Muslim Turkish nation out of the ruins of the multinational Ottoman Empire.

Morris and Ze'evi write: "We found the proofs of Turkey's 1915–1916 anti-Armenian genocide to be incontrovertible" (p. 1). To arrive at their conclusions, the two authors cite freely and voluminously from masses of "reliable … German, Austro-Hungarian, British, American, and French documents, produced by diplomats and consular officials working in Turkey[,] and available in Western archives, as well as the papers of dozens of Western missionaries who worked in Turkey during those years" (p. 8). On the other hand, they reject as "sanitized" Turkish records that "have undergone several bouts of purging … so that researchers today will find almost no documents incriminating Ottoman Turkish leaders in the ethnic cleansings between 1894 and 1924" (p. 6). Piling on, the coauthors add that, "we believe that a final purge [of the Turkish documents] was conducted more recently, during the digitization of the archives" (p. 8). Thus, according to the two authors, "the main reason not to trust the Turkish archives is that reliable sources contradict them" (p. 8).

There can be no doubt that Muslims did commit unspeakable outrages against their Christian neighbors. Morris and Ze'evi recite numerous reputed details regarding decapitations, disembowelments, crucified priests, severed fingers and ears, mass rape of women and girls, etc. However, despite their frequent assertions and implications, they fail to prove that the Ottoman authorities ordered these horrific deeds, as opposed to their resulting from the primitive state of Ottoman resources that led to what might be termed "criminal deaths" due to local vendettas, robberies, neglect, starvation, etc. The authors also largely gloss over too blithely or simply ignore solid counterarguments and evidence that the Christians often gave as much as they received.

Furthermore, if we are going to speak about a continuing genocide whose roots date back well before World War I, it is only fair to start with the deportations and mass killings of Muslims from the Balkans by the newly created Christian states, beginning with the Greek war of independence in the 1820s and followed by the ethnic cleansing of the Caucasus in 1864, Bulgaria in 1877–78, and present-day northern Greece and Macedonia in 1912–13. In this period several million Muslim refugees (known as muhacirler in Turkish) were deported to present-day Turkey or murdered in situ, a dynamic that helped lead to fear and hatred of Christians in Anatolia. In addition, the Serbian genocidal attacks against Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s might also be viewed as a modernday continuation of these earlier acts.

Nor do the authors give fair bent to the long-running Armenian terrorist provocations against Muslims during the 1890s, documented well by the famous American historian William Langer and the even more famous British scholar Arnold J. Toynbee, among others, as well as by Armenian scholars themselves, such as Louise Nalbandian. The authors also neglect even to mention the testimony of Hovhannes Kajaznuni, the first prime minister of...