INTRODUCTION
THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE
On the night of April 24, 1915, more than 200 intellectuals, community and religious leaders were rounded up in Constantinople by the Ottoman imperial government.1 It was the last time many of them would be seen alive. That night marked the beginning of what is today called the Armenian Genocide and would result in the deaths of well over one million civilians in the midst of World War I (1914–18). This book is a history of the first attempt to intervene on behalf of genocide victims and prosecute those responsible. Why this failed and why that matters is at the heart of the story that follows.
In 1919, Britain indicted the Ottoman Empire for what the international community labeled a “crime against humanity.” This act gave intervention into the affairs of other states on humanitarian grounds both a legal and moral cause. It left an important legacy and remains a guiding principle in modern attempts to stop genocide and prosecute war crimes.
Understanding the historical response to genocide requires going back to before World War I. The Ottoman Empire's elimination of its minority Armenian, Assyrian and Greek population between 1915 and 1923 had its roots in the story of empire, nineteenth-century Great Power politics and the rise of global institutions. Massacres of civilians during times of war was nothing new. For centuries populations large and small survived in the cross-fire of foreign and civil wars. But what happened in 1915 tested the boundaries of wartime excess and crossed over into the realm of genocide due to its systematic execution, intent and the targeting of particular civilian populations who became the objects of a state-sponsored violence which culminated in a policy of extermination.
The Ottoman Empire's minority problem started long before the fateful night of April 24. Starting in the nineteenth century, pogroms against Christian minorities periodically raged in the cities and provinces of the Empire leaving destruction in their wake. The rise of the popular press with foreign news reporters and big readerships at the end of the nineteenth century brought news of these massacres to the outside world for the first time and demanded a response. In 1876, atrocities committed by Turkish troops against Bulgarian civilians which preceded the Russo-Turkish War (1877–8) received widespread coverage in the press, as did massacres of Ottoman minority populations in Crete, Macedonia, Cyprus and Anatolia (Asia Minor). In the mid-1890s, the Hamidian Massacres in eastern Anatolia captured the attention of Britain, Europe and America. In 1909, the mass slaughter of Armenians in the town of Adana shocked the world.
No one imagined that these massacres would lead to a plan for the elimination of Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire. That the Armenians were the main population targeted in 1915 makes sense only in hindsight. Armenians, as the largest minority population in the Empire, had long been subjected to violence and political inequalities. Greeks and Assyrians, two other Ottoman minority communities, were also targeted. The rise of Turkish nationalism in the late nineteenth century, articulated by some as “Turkey for the Turks,” made the position of the Ottoman Empire's non-Muslim Christian population more precarious. Armenian nationalism arose, in part, as a reaction to these claims, as did demands for more autonomy and civil rights. Although Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians lived alongside their Muslim neighbors for centuries occupying the same land, growing the same crops, trading in the same villages and cities, as Christians they could not lay claim to a Turkish identity which had become increasingly tied to Islam. Living together in a multi-confessional community, sometimes at war but mostly at peace, was a reality of the minority experience in the Ottoman Empire. When genocide came in 1915, many thought that these massacres would also run their course and survivors could get back to rebuilding their lives after the crisis passed. This did not happen as those who survived were sent into exile as refugees, many with stamps on their passports explicitly prohibiting their “right to return”.
Reports of massacre, genocide and exile did not go unnoticed at the time and sparked a significant international response. This story is told here through the eyes of British statesmen, the public and aid workers because of the central role played by the British Empire in shaping what the global humanitarian response would look like. Historians largely have focused on American reactions to nineteenth-century massacres in the Ottoman Empire and later the Armenian Genocide.2 While important, the focus on the US has obscured the wider context in which the international community attempted to mitigate the effects of genocide through humanitarian intervention and later try Ottoman official for crimes against humanity in war crimes tribunals after World War I. The European-wide response to massacre in the nineteenth century has also received attention along with the response of individual nation states.3 New research on the role of Germany regarding the genocide reveals the significance of the Armenian issue to Great Power politics and modern humanitarianism.4 British imperial leadership in the campaign against massacre warrants closer consideration in light of this scholarship. Ultimately, the British Empire provided the blueprint for how the international community responded to charges of “crimes against humanity” against the Ottoman Empire.
The Armenian question was one of the most prominent humanitarian causes of the Victorian period. Regularly mentioned in the same breath as the movement to reform the Belgian Congo under King Leopold II's brutal regime in Africa, it captured the imagination of a generation of philanthropists, politicians and the wider public. Nowhere was the humanitarian campaign to aid Armenians more visible than in the press. Turn-of-the-century reviews and magazines discussed the Armenian massacres of the 1890s significantly more often than the well-publicized Congo Reform campaign.5
Why did the trials of a small, minority peoples living in the Near East attract so much attention and become the focus of humanitarian activism abroad? More importantly, how did this concern cross over from providing humanitarian aid to justifying the intervention in the affairs of another sovereign state? The answer to both questions lies in the late-Victorian moment when the reach and power of Britain's empire was heavily invested in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire to protect its own imperial advantage in the region. At the same time, Britain emerged at the center of an outward-looking humanitarian movement that understood the protection of Ottoman minority populations as central to Britain's moral mission abroad which often conveniently ignored the excesses of its own empire and crimes committed against its subjects. The Armenian cause had particular currency for liberals who understood it as the embodiment of universal humanitarian ideals and the pax Britannica.
W.E. Gladstone, the indefatigable Liberal Party leader, opened up the question of whether or not the British Empire should intervene on behalf of persecuted minorities to the wider public. Other voices joined Gladstone in denouncing atrocities in the Ottoman Empire. The media played a key role in shaping public opinion over what to do about the Armenian question. Those who participated in these debates left behind their own stories about why and how they chose to help. This book relies on the voices of well-known and lesser-known Britons who, starting in the 1850s, began to engage the issue of how to use foreign policy and diplomacy to stop massacre. Also included are the prejudices and bias which came to inform public and private responses to the killings. This orientalist world view cut both ways.6 Anti-Muslim sentiment, along with racialized understandings of both Turks and Armenians, were part of how some of these historical actors viewed their world. Rather than focus on the influence of orientalist thinking on imperial identity formation which has been undertaken by other studies, this book targets the public discourse surrounding the question of Britain's responsibility to intervene by those who became intensely involved in debates over the crisis.7 These included politicians, journalists, philanthropists and others who wrote, gave money and pledged support for victims. This humanitarian activism created a body of knowledge about distant strangers living in distant lands whose plight periodically became part of the everyday fabric of public discourse.
Knowledge is not always power. Protests, policy debates and media campaigns on behalf of massacre victims ultimately only had limited effect. Put bluntly, telling the public about the plight of victims did not stop the killings. Media campaigns – loud, certain and seemingly ever present in the initial stages – inevitably fade as the news cycle runs its course. Knowing what happened and responding with humanitarian aid never has been enough. The following chapters explore why this came to be when the international community issued its first response to the crime of genocide.
The important work of tracing the road to genocide and understanding its causes has long engaged historians. Rather than focus on proving that what happened to Ottoman Christian minorities in the midst of World War I constituted genocide – this has been dealt with in another body of scholarship8 – what follows is the view from those who witnessed these events from abroad during the time leading up to and following, what they characterized as, the establishing of eliminating Armenians from Anatolia as an official policy of the Ottoman Empire. To see this event otherwise would be to distort the archives that I have relied on from throughout Britain in the service of hollow political agendas. Previous scholarship has studied the question of genocide in the Armenian case.9 The time has come to focus on the responses to genocide and how it continues to influence what nations do when confronted with humanitarian crises abroad.
The case of the British Empire and the Armenian Genocide constituted a defining moment in shaping how the international community would respond to “crimes against humanity.” It matters that this happened in the midst of a devastating world war fought against the Central Powers by Britain and its Allies. Britain's leadership role in this regard has been overlooked, in part because of the focus on US archives and America's remarkable role in raising over a billion dollars in aid for victims at the time. Historians have combed through diplomatic, institutional and private US archives which have led to a clear picture of the who, what, when and where of the Armenian Genocide. Much of this research engages the question of whether or not the killings constituted genocide. Recent efforts to examine the archives in Turkey, Germany, France and Britain have yielded important findings in this regard. The result is a fuller, more comprehensive picture of what happened in 1915.
But while many historians cite Foreign Office archives, no systematic study of British archives has been undertaken in light of recent scholarship on the topic. The 100th anniversary of the event in 2015 witnessed the publication of a number of important studies on why the genocide happened. Raymond Kevorkian's Complete History of the Armenian Genocide uses European, Middle Eastern, Turkish, and American source material to meticulously and scrupulously document the event and offer a clear understanding of the motives of perpetrators and the cost for victims. Ronald Grigor Suny's They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else explains the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire as a key causal factor in the attempt to destroy the Armenians under the cover of world war. Leading scholars consider these causal factors in the edited collection of essays, A Question of Genocide, and explain the social, economic and political factors that led to genocide against Armenians and other Ottoman Christian minorities, namely the Greek and Assyrian populations who lived in villages across Anatolia. Finally, Vahakn Dadrian and Taner Akc¸am explain the failures of the first international war crimes trials held to bring to justice perpetrators of the genocide after World War I in Judgment at Istanbul. To this research, this book adds the story of the response by the most powerful internationalist institutional force at the time: the British Empire.
Understanding the first global response to genocide, then, can help explain why the international community has failed to stop genocide past and present through humanitarian and legal intervention. Stories of failure often produce lessons of truth. The birth of international institutions today charged with prosecuting genocide and crimes against humanity came out of the immediate postwar moment when considerations of what to do about the Armenian Genocide were on the minds of world leaders. Leading the charge was Britain's wartime leader, David Lloyd George, and American President, Woodrow Wilson. The idea for a League of Nations that would later transform into the United Nations was a postwar one which would claim for itself the responsibility for identifying crimes against humanity and genocide and mediating charges of war crimes. Proposed in Wilson's Fourteen Points, the League was largely implemented by the British who led the organization and shaped its values after the US refused to join.10 The question of whether or not to attempt to influence the internal affairs of sovereign states on behalf of vulnerable minorities was one of its earliest charges. It is the legacy of this moment, when Britain established the rules of the international order in the wake of world war, which still influences the way war crimes are prosecuted, investigated and understood today.
Responding to Genocide
The chapters that follow chart the rise and fall of Britain's engagement with the problem of massacre and genocide before, during and immediately following World War I. This experience influenced what the new internationalism that took hold after the war would look like and how the Allies would react to revelations of civilian massacre during wartime.11 The mass killing of Armenian civilians by the Ottoman Empire led Europe's Great Powers to declare it a “crime against humanity” just weeks after the massacres commenced. The opening chapters explain why this mandate loomed so large by considering debates over humanitarian and diplomatic intervention which started in the Victorian period. The slaughter of, by some estimates, over 100,000 Armenians in a series of massacres committed in Anatolia the mid-1890s under the despotic rule of Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II further crystalized the imperative of what came to be known as Gladstone's humanitarian mission on behalf of Armenians.
The media spoke out against what one journalist in the mid-1890s labeled as a crime of historical proportions.12 Such indignation also characterized understandings of the killing of an estimated 25,000 Armenians in 1909 in the southeastern Ottoman market town of Adana. The successful rebellion of Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia, all with large minority Christian populations, against Ottoman rule emboldened prominent British politicians to lobby Parliament to find a way to enforce minority protection agreements in what remained of the Empire. The Ottoman Empire's decision in November 1914 to join World War I on the side of Germany put Allied pledges to Christian minorities in sharp relief. By this time, Britain was recognized as the primary watchdog of minority interests in the Middle East.
This analysis provides an important context for the response to the event of the genocide itself. The mass arrest of Armenian intellectuals and religious leaders was immediately followed by the Allied invasion of the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. News of the arrests transformed what one commentator called a “war against German militarism” into “a war of liberation” for “small nationalities” throughout Europe and Asia. Viscount James Bryce, a well-regarded British statesman known for his advocacy of Armenian causes, set to work on a document that made the defense of minority civilians during wartime a matter of honor for the international community. Published as a Parliamentary Blue Book in October 1916, his massive volume offered compelling evidence of concurrent massacres throughout Anatolia. Bryce attributed this pattern to an “exceedingly systematic” policy by the Ottoman Turks to eliminate Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians from the Ottoman Empire. Citing examples of “pious and humane” officials and “Moslems [sic] who tried to save their Christian neighbors,” Bryce maintained that “there is nothing in the precepts of Islam which justifies this slaughter.”13 These findings, commissioned by the British government, brought together for the first time the proof and arguments that would shape the meaning of genocide as later understood during the Jewish Holocaust.
US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau witnessed brutalities firsthand. He echoed Bryce, lamenting that the Armenians were being “pitilessly destroyed.” Morgenthau took the matter directly to his Turkish counterpart, declaring, “You are making a terrible mistake.”14 These two diplomats published disturbing, verifiable accounts that had wide audiences and a huge effect on public opinion. The “Armenian barbarities” required retribution, the authors argued. This “matter of vital import to the honour of humanity and the good faith and wellbeing of the world,” as the Archbishop of Canterbury put it, constituted an “outrage on civilization without historical parallel in the world.”15
An assessment of the aftermath of World War I and the attempt to try the Ottoman Empire for “crimes against humanity” concludes this study. The US supported the British push for investigations into the massacres. Divided public opinion in the US over the war delayed President Wilson's decision to enter the conflict until April 6, 1917. However, his longstanding endorsement of British objectives was well-known, despite his initial public platform of neutrality, and extended to the aid of persecuted Ottoman Christians. He buoyed self-determination for minorities in his “14 Points” from early 1918, which had a special provision for Armenians who Wilson believed “should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.”
Humanitarian, civic, church, and missionary organizations attested that the Armenian massacres constituted what Bryce had labeled a premeditated, politically motivated offense. International channels recognized it as what today would be called state-sponsored terror against a people marked as an internal enemy. While the Ottoman government claimed that Armenians had conspired against the empire during the war which justified the slaughter, it could produce little evidence to support these claims. On May 24, 1915, a joint European declaration accused Turkey of crimes “against humanity and civilization,” marking the first use of the term in relation to mass civilian atrocity.16 The US immediately was made privy to this declaration, which raised the stakes for the US and Britain by implicating it in the prosecution of those accused of planning and initiating the massacres.
The Allies, spurred by Britain, sought legal redress for war crimes after combat ended. They made the Ottoman Empire aware in peace negotiations that because it had sided with Germany, it would be liable for wrongs committed against minorities during the war. After the signing of the Armistice with the Ottoman Empire in late 1918 at Mudros, the press confidently affirmed that those responsible for the massacres “would come as a matter of course” due to the resolve of the Allies.17 The result was the Ottoman War Crimes Tribunals, a series of courts-martial set up to prosecute Turkish officials for the Armenian massacres, a condition of the peace. By spring 1919, the Ottoman bureaucracy, under pressure from the British had arrested more than 100 high-profile suspects, including government ministers and military officers. Trials began in early 1919 and disbanded in July 1922.
Three minor officials were executed for “crimes against humanity,” a term deployed by British representatives and Ottoman prosecutors in reference to the proceedings. Over the next three years, at least 63 additional cases came to trial involving 200 suspects, but only a fraction were convicted, and the majority of those sentences were never served.
What explains the limited punishment? The conclusion to the book assesses how the failure to fully prosecute key figures deemed responsible for the Armenian Genocide came from the problem of translating the rhetoric of imperial responsibility to protect vulnerable minorities into action. The glacial pace of the Ottoman peace settlement, when compared to the war settlement with Germany, diminished Britain's moral posturing. Military swagger abated with the drawing down of troops in Anatolia; by summer 1919, Britain significantly reduced its military forces in the region, making it difficult for the Allies to force their will on Ottoman leadership. Also, the US preferred not to form an international body to try war crimes because it worried about foreign entanglements and, therefore, left the task to the British. Finally, and most importantly, the Ottoman War Crimes Tribunals, as they have become known, did not fall under the legal jurisdiction of any one Allied country or the new League of Nations.
Following through with the maze of prosecutions meant balancing a commitment to intervene with concerns over what the Allies could and could not do in the early days of an unstable peace. The Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923 would finally end hostilities four years after the signing of the armistice agreement. The rise of Turkish nationalism threatened British influence in the region and stymied peace negotiations. Ideological resolve faltered as neither Britain nor the US pushed the redresses forward. Winston Churchill argued that the burden of overseeing trials that had become a matter of internal Turkish politics might result in further fomenting nationalist anger over the Allied hold in the Middle East. These dilemmas exposed the tension between a foreign policy guided by moral ideals and sobering geopolitical realities – and ultimately undermined promises to defend human rights. The first prosecution of those accused of genocide largely came to naught.
The memory of the mass killings of Armenian civilians under the cover of world war, however, continues to animate how the international community understands what Raphael Lemkin first identified as “genocide” or “race murder” in the early 1940s.18 Reflecting on the Armenian Genocide as part of the 100-year commemoration of World War I offers an opportunity to understand why the crime of genocide persists as a very real threat for marginalized minority communities around the globe. The Armenian case, and the genocides that have followed in its wake, serve as a regular reminder that genocide will not go away. Studying the failed response to the Armenian Genocide is key to understanding the relationship between the origins of modern humanitarian practice and the pursuit of human rights justice with a keen eye always looking toward the future.