At the end of the grueling task that writing a book like this one represents, I have the feeling that I have made a new contribution to research on the subject, but I am also well aware that many of the historical points touched on here will call for further work from scholars for a long time to come. The corpus of documents that provides the basis for the present volume is, to be sure, extensive, and helped me shed light on hitherto unexplored aspects of this outbreak of mass violence, but it did not allow me to penetrate to the depths of the Young Turk system; many unknowns remain. I was able to observe the activities of the Young Turk Central Committee only through indirect sources – as a rule, European intelligence services – in the case of a revolutionary organization like the CUP, such activities are by nature secret. Similarly, such access as we have to the internal procedures of the Special Organization continues to depend exclusively on the memoirs of its former members or foreign observers. There are no known archival funds for these two organizations, the veritable instigators and organizers of the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians, and this constitutes a major lacuna. A few hints, however, as we have indicated now and again in the course of this study, suggest that materials emanating from the Young Turk movement have survived and are probably held in Ankara today. When the time comes, they will surely shed decisive light on the circumstances surrounding the liquidation of the Armenians.
On the other hand, I believe that I have provided a very close analysis of the construction of the CUP’s ideology and the party’s ethno-nationalistic radicalization. I also think that I have brought out the nature of the friendly or conflictual relations that the Armenian Committees, Hnchak or Dashnak, maintained with the Ittihadist movement. When one compares these experiences, one discovers a striking cultural and even, in certain respects, ideological affinity between the groups in question. By exhuming the most important of the texts that express the Armenian revolutionaries’ profound convictions about their Young Turk colleagues, and vice versa, I think that I have seized their points of convergence and, above all, the latent antagonism haunting them. It is clear that their respective conceptions of the empire’s future were not all that different and that in both groups there were men convinced of the possibility of going a part of the road together, before circumstances conspired to promote a radicalization of the Young Turk Central Committee.
That said, it is no longer possible today to defend the thesis that a programmed destruction of the Armenian population was set in motion by Abdülhamid and brought to completion by the Young Turks. The Hamidian practice of partial amputation of the Armenian social body for the purpose, as it were, of reducing it to politically acceptable proportions, cannot be put on the same level as the policy of ethnic homogenization conceived by the CUP. Moreover, it has been established that the process that culminated in the perpetration of the genocide was signposted by a series of decisions that reveal the progressive radicalization of the Young Turk party-state, motivated notably by the serious military setbacks that it suffered on the Caucasian front. This affirmation must, however, be tempered in view of the lessons furnished by an attentive examination of the ideological development of the men in control of the state. Their desire to homogenize Asia Minor, to Turkify this territory, obviously went back a long way and certainly constituted the starting point for the collective thought process that eventually culminated, after going through a number of stages, in the plan for the physical destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. The plan to deport Greeks from the Aegean seacoast and Armenians from the eastern provinces concocted by the Young Turk Central Committee in February 1914 apparently ref ected – as Taner Akçam has clearly shown – its desire to modify the demographic makeup of Asia Minor, to make it a “Turkish” space but not necessarily to liquidate its non-Turkish elements. The Armenians, who were initially one of the party’s secondary priorities after the Greeks, were, it seems, initially supposed to go settle the Syrian and Mesopotamian deserts, areas considered to lie outside the Turkish heartland. But the CUP’s ambitions were not limited to these population shifts alone. Muslim non-Turks, ranked according to their perceived capacities for assimilation to the proposed “Turkish” model, were also deported in order to fill the vacuum left in various places by the deportation of the Greek and Armenian populations. This vast internal manipulation of historical groups, reflecting a nationalist ideology and a geo-strategic logic, took its place within a still more ambitious plan that sought to create a geographic and demographic continuum with the Muslim or Turkish-speaking populations of the Caucasus. The stinging defeat dealt out to the Ottoman army in Sarıkamiş in late December 1914 not only convinced the Young Turk Central Committee of the impossibility of achieving its ambitions, but no doubt also induced it to compensate for these reverses by adopting a more radical policy toward the Armenian population. This stage in the radicalization process may be dated 22–25 March 1915. If the new, more radical policy did not enjoy the unanimous support of the Young Turk Central Committee, it also did not elicit strong opposition.
The region-by-region examination of the process of deportation and extirpation also tends to show that at the outset, the Young Turks’ liquidation plan bore only on the populations of the six eastern vilayets considered to be the Armenians’ historical lands. However, the two- month lag observable in the operations affecting the Armenian colonies in Anatolia, which were integrated into their predominantly Turkish environment, can also be interpreted as the consummation – late, to be sure – of the liquidation program. The difference in the treatments meted out to conscripts enrolled in the Third Army and men from the eastern provinces, almost all of whom were eliminated locally, whereas the recruits from the communities of Anatolia served on the front in the Dardanelles or in the Fourth Army without being subjected to serious mistreatment, plainly shows that the Young Turk plan had been intelligently elaborated. Depending on where the people affected came from, the plan provided for immediate liquidation of the men, recruits or not, or rational exploitation of their skills and labor-power. Differential treatment is also observable as far as the rest of the population – women, children, and old people – is concerned. Study of the methods and means employed to deport these people indicates that the convoys that set out from the eastern vilayets were systematically destroyed en route and that only a small minority of deportees arrived in their “places of relegation.” It can be seen, in contrast, that the Armenians from the colonies in Anatolia or Thrace were sent to Syria with their families, often by rail, and that they got at least as far as Cilicia.
The ultimate stage of the destruction process, which we have called the “second phase of the genocide,” was aimed precisely at these survivors, most of who came from Anatolia or Cilicia. The material context for these new acts of violence, the concentration camps in Syria or Upper Mesopotamia, was long terra incognita for scholars. Returning to a preliminary study of this subject, I have situated, on the basis of a few converging indices, the ultimate decision to destroy these remaining deportees in late February or early March 1916. This decision affected some 500,000 surviving deportees who had reached Syria and Mesopotamia six months and more earlier, and sometimes even adapted to their new environment so well as to be able to support themselves there. In this precise case, two clashing logics – military needs and the desire to liquidate all the survivors without exception – can clearly be discerned, against the background of the rivalry between the leaders of the Central Committee and the region’s military commander, Ahmed Cemal. The arrival of delegates of the Young Turk party in Syria and the fact that the Council of Ministers appointed the main executioners of the eastern vilayets to head the regions in which deportees were to be found are so many concrete signs announcing the “second phase of the genocide,” which ran from April to December 1916. In many respects, this phase illustrates the Young Turk Central Committee’s genocidal will even better than the first, for the Central Committee could not, in this case, take shelter behind its discourse about security and its theory about a plot against the Turkish state. Concretely, it set out to liquidate a population of which the great majority was made up of women and children. The general slaughter organized, notably, in Syria even seems to flow from a virtually pathological animosity toward the survivors, at antipodes from anything resembling rational governance.
More generally, it appears that the procedure elaborated by the Central Committee was the fruit of extended reflection on the demographic composition of Anatolia and Asia Minor, with the ambition of remodeling the human geography of these regions. It is this geographer’s logic, the basis for the conception of the liquidation plan, on which we have focused precisely in order to reconstitute the process of destruction itself, the object of the fourth part of the present study.
A study of mass crimes such as genocide can obviously not be restricted to an examination of the acts of the “criminal state,” even if the circumstances that led to the unleashing of such violence inevitably fascinate the historian. The historiography of the genocide of the Armenians long left the victims’ experience to one side. Vahakn Dadrian, to whom we owe a great deal, long affirmed that sources provided by the survivors themselves could not be taken into account in so controversial a case. He himself deliberately limited himself to Turkish sources on the one hand and German and Austro-Hungarian sources on the other, all the better to “prove” that the genocide really occurred. In so doing, he focused his gaze almost exclusively on the executioners and ignored the real fate of the victims. Their fate, in contrast, has its place in my overall project. The aim here is to let the victims speak, thereby recovering their lived experience, something that does not require proof of any kind whatsoever. After steeping myself for several years in accounts produced “as the events unfolded” – just what that means is defined in the present work – I came to the conclusion that it was not only possible, but essential to exploit the Armenian sources, comparing them with materials provided by diplomats and missionaries and also with each other. The two main archives that I have exploited here, held respectively by the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem (the Monastery of Saint James) and the Nubar Library of the Armenian General Benevolent Union in Paris, comprise a unique corpus that allowed me to make a comprehensive study of the geography of the genocide, thanks to some 10,000 pages of handwritten documents. In other words, they enabled me to compile an account of the summary executions in the eastern regions, of each convoy of deportees, the routes they took, the killing fields through which they passed, and, more generally, the experience of the “long march”; it revealed the natural selection that took place en route and the characteristics of those categories of Armenians whom the Young Turk Central Committee considered leaving alive, the better to integrate them into its plan to Turkify Asia Minor. As the Young Turks saw matters, young children – preferably little girls – and older girls or women were destined to reinforce the “Turkish nation” after going through a ritual of integration into the dominant group that was borrowed from the Muslim religion. As a Young Turk officer put it, Armenian women with a certain level of education were predestined to accelerate the modernization of the Turkish family and Turkish society. The many different cases described in the present volume show that Young Turk nationalist ideology is rooted in a form of racism directed against the collective identity of a group rather than in individual biological rejection of the kind later practiced by the Nazi regime. Careful examination of all these secondary effects of the genocide best illustrates how closely the murder of the Armenians was bound up with the construction of the Turkish nation.
Another aspect of the Young Turk plan seems to me to have been brought out clearly here – the systematic seizure of the individual and collective property of the Ottoman Armenians, which went hand-in-hand with the attempt to form a Turkish middle class of businessmen. The regime’s sociologist, Ziya Gökalp, provided the theory for this program, baptized Millî İktisat (National Economy). We have analyzed the way it worked. It obviously constituted the socio-economic complement to the mass crimes. It served as both a justification and an incentive. It has been shown here that it benefited the Young Turk elite and the party-state above all, but all other social strata as well, notably those who participated in the Young Turk movement without necessarily sharing the extremist ideology of its leaders. The lust for gain no doubt did much to radicalize men who under other circumstances would not have acted as they did because they would have been held back by moral principles of religious inspiration. The action of the party-state itself and the propaganda that it methodically orchestrated to stigmatize the Armenians as a group did the rest.
On the basis of an inventory of those chiefly to blame for this genocide, whether civilian and military officials or local notables, it can be affirmed that the individuals who were the most deeply implicated in the mass violence of ten came from the most marginal social groups and, it must be emphasized, were often members of minorities with roots in the Caucasus. This holds for the Çerkez and Chechens in particular, who it seems safe to say had accounts to settle with their painful history and were easily led to identify the Armenians with their Russian oppressors. The major role played by “the” Kurds, which is stressed by Turkish historiography and also by many Western scholars, turns out, upon examination, to be much less clear-cut than has been affirmed. Indeed, it comes down to the active participation of nomadic Kurdish tribes and only rarely involves sedentary villagers, who were encouraged by the Special Organization to take what they could from deportees already stripped of their most valuable assets. There can be no doubt that Turkish historiography ultimately contaminated independent scholars who were not necessarily in a position to assess the accuracy of this dogma that had its practical uses for those seeking to shake off the burden of a violent past at the expense of a group that is itself stigmatized in our day.
Examining the last issue discussed in the present study, the trials of the authors of the genocide or, more specifically, the attempts to bring them to justice undertaken by both the Ottoman authorities and international institutions, has allowed me to evaluate the determination of the Ottoman state and Turkish society to assume their responsibility for the liquidation of the Armenians. This chapter of the history treated here clearly illustrates the incapacity of the great majority to consider these acts punishable crimes; it confronts us with a self-justifying discourse that persists in our own day, a kind of denial of the “original sin,” the act that gave birth to the Turkish nation, regenerated and re-centered in a purified space. That said, these parodies of justice made it possible to assemble a great deal of judicial material – evidence given to a formalistic court-martial that was interested above all in pinning the blame for the crimes committed on a small group of men, the better to free the Ottoman state from its obligations and provide the nascent Turkish nation with a certain “virginity.”
Parallel to these legal proceedings, the repeated attempts to interfere in them by Unionist circles show that the new authorities never succeeded in throwing off the Young Turks’ tutelage. The sabotage of the legal proceedings, the theft of incriminating evidence, and the organization of the flight and transfer to Anatolia of the accused that were undertaken from the Anatolian and, soon, Kemalist sanctuary attest the influence of the Young Turk network that at most sought, by promoting Mustafa Kemal, to flee the gaze of the international community.
Finally, I would like to insist on the preparations made mainly by the British and French governments to bring the Young Turk criminals before an international “High Court.” The legal categories elaborated from February 1919 on by the Committee of Responsibilities and its various subcommittees operating within the framework of the preliminary peace conference did not, it is true, find practical application. They did, however, provide direct inspiration for the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the U.N. in 1948.
The mass of material1 emanating from the Information Bureau of the Patriarchate of Constantinople that has been exploited throughout this study shows that the reconstructed Armenian institutions were resolved to identify those responsible for the extirpation of the Armenian population. The Armenians continued to be those best informed about the issue, those most familiar with the Young Turk elites. In addition to numerous lists of those responsible in the various regions, the Information Bureau also drew up lists of the “major culprits,” while explaining the philosophy on which the compilation of such lists was based.2 The Turks have elevated some of these individuals to the rank of national heroes; others formed the exclusive circles that helped Mustafa Kemal forge contemporary Turkey.
The formula “destroying in order to build” perhaps best reflects, with only a touch of exaggeration, the logic that dominated the Young Turk regime in 1915 and that still permeates the ideological and cultural foundations of a society which rejects its past.