Armenians today are at another moment of passage. Their journey through time and over the globe has gone on for over 2500 years, and as the world turns toward a new millennium, it is not surprising that they look back once again to their most painful memories. A people burdened by so much history cannot but think of the terrible trauma of the present and the dangerous opportunities of the future. Armenians have been through too much to look to the future with fear. And in contrast to some other nations, they also should not fear to look squarely at their past.
The Armenian Genocide is both an historical event and a sacred moment of national trauma.
Almost all Armenians have a vague idea that something terrible happened to their ancestors at the beginning of the twentieth century. But precisely what happened and why is often poorly understood. In part, the lack of knowledge is the fault of those who have denied or distorted the events and their causes. But in part it is also the result of the failure of intellectuals to do fundamental research and scholarly analytical writing on the events of 1915; and in part it is a sign of a more general social disease that afflicts Americans in particular, the widespread amnesia about history.
Even the Jewish Holocaust, despite all the efforts of the Jewish community and armies of scholars, is perpetually in danger of being forgotten. A poll a few years ago showed that 22 percent of all Americans believed that the Nazi killing of the Jews may not have occurred, and even more disturbingly, almost one-quarter of young people 18-29 years old believed that it was possible that there had been no Holocaust.
What has come to be known as "the first genocide of the twentieth century" had its origins in the aspirations of a small group of Turkish politicians associated with the Committee of Union and Progress (Young Turks). That movement against the autocratic rule of the "Bloody Sultan" Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) was never tightly united. It contained within it both liberal Turks willing to imagine a reformed Ottoman Empire in which all peoples, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim, could live in harmony, and nationalist Turks who feared and despised non-Turks (even other Muslims, like the Arabs) and were suspicious above all of the Armenians. In the long years of Abdulhamid IPs oppressive regime, the more liberal Turks and the revolutionary Armenian committees organized by the Dashnaktsutiun worked together in a common front to bring down the sultan. Revolts broke out in eastern Anatolia in 1905-1907, most notably in Erzurum, that were initiated by Armenians and Turks working jointly.
At first Ottoman Armenians and other minorities joyfully greeted the 1908 revolution that brought the Young Turks to power. They hoped that the restoration of the liberal constitution would lead to peaceful development within the framework of a representative parliamentary system. The leading Armenian political party, the Dashnaktsutiun, continued to work with the Young Turks up through the first years of the Great War. Nevertheless, the deep social hostilities between the peoples of the empire persisted, indeed worsened, in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Armenians were visible in the business world and as close colleagues of European investors and entrepreneurs. Muslims, who dominated the empire politically, were subordinated economically and social y to non-Muslims in the work world. Turks were angry that Armenians seemed to be superior to Muslims in a Muslim empire. Conservative Muslims targeted Armenians in particular, seeing them as treacherous subjects suspiciously sympathetic to Europeans. After centuries of governing the Armenians as a separate ethnoreligious community, Turkish political leaders increasingly saw Armenians as an alien people, as disloyal, subversive, "separatist," and a threat to the unity of the empire.
Social grievances in towns, along with the population pressure and competition for resources in agriculture, were part of a toxic mix of social and political tensions that provided the environment for growing hostility toward the Armenians. But the catalyst for killing, however, was not spontaneously generated out of the tinder of social and cultural tensions. It came from the state itself and from officials and conservative clergy who had for decades perceived Armenians as alien to the Turkish Empire. Ultimately genocide is action taken by a government.
As Europe drifted through the last decade before World War I, the Ottoman government experienced a series of political and military defeats: the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austro-Hungary in 1908, the subsequent declaration of independence by Bulgaria, the merger of Crete with Greece, revolts in Albania in 1910- 1912, losses to Italy in Libya (1911), and in the course of two Balkan wars (1912-1913) the diminution of Ottoman territory in Europe and the forced migration of Turks from Europe into Anatolia. As liberal strategies failed to unify and strengthen the empire, the Young Turk leaders shifted steadily toward a more Turkish nationalist ideology that emphasized the dominant role of Turks. A group of Young Turk officers, led by Enver Pasha, seized the government in a coup d’état in 1913, and for the next five years, years fateful for all Armenians, a triumvirate of Enver, Jemal, and Talaat ruled the empire. Their regime marked the triumph of Turkish nationalism within the government itself.
Among the Young Turks were those, like Enver, who had grandiose plans for expanding their empire eastward to include the Turkic peoples of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The shift toward nationalism and Pan-Turkic expansionism left the Armenian political leadership in an impossible position. Torn between continuing to cooperate with the Young Turks in the hope that some gains might be won for the Armenians and breaking with their undependable political allies and going over to the opposition, the Dashnaktsutiun decided to maintain its alliance with the ruling party. Other Armenian political and cultural leaders, however, most notably the Hnchak party and the Armenian Patriarchate, opposed further collaboration with the government.
As Turkey entered the First World War, even as Armenian soldiers joined the Ottoman army to fight against the enemies of the empire, the situation grew extremely ominous for the Armenians. They were dangerously exposed. The bulk of their population lived in the mountainous plateau that lay between two belligerents, Turkey and Russia. Everywhere in their historic homeland, except for an occasional town or cluster of villages, they were a minority living among hostile Turks and Kurds, and the perception by Muslims as a disloyal, treacherous people, one that favored the Christian government of the tsars to that of the Turks, seemed to be reinforced by the events of the World War. Russian Armenians had volunteered to fight for the tsar against the Ottoman regime. When the Young Turks demanded that the Dashnaktsutiun incite Russian Armenians to rise against the tsar, the Armenian party stated that it could insure the loyalty of Turkish Armenians to Turkey but not that of Armenians across the border. The scene was set for disaster.
Anxious to fight the Russians in 1914, the Turkish government instigated the war by attacking Russian ships in the Black Sea. Enver led a huge army against tsarist forces on the eastern front late in the year, and at first he was dramatically victorious. Kars was cut off and Sarikamish surrounded. But the Turkish troops were not prepared for the harsh winter in the Armenian highlands, and early in 1915 the Russians, accompanied by Armenian volunteer units from the Caucasus, pushed the Turkish army back. A devastating defeat followed in which Enver lost three-quarters of his army, perhaps as many as 78,000 men killed with 12,000 taken prisoner. Ottoman Armenians, who had repeatedly experienced Turkish reprisals, fled to the areas occupied by the Russians, confirming in Turkish minds the treachery that marked the Christian minorities.
Enver's defeat on the Caucasian front was the prelude to the "final solution" of the Armenian Question. The Russians posed a real danger to the Turks, just at the moment that Allied forces were attacking at Gallipoli in the west. Russian, British, and French diplomats were exchanging notes outlining their plans for dismembering the Ottoman Empire. In this moment of defeat and desperation, the triumvirate in Istanbul began to demobilize the Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army, systematically to murder them, and to deport Armenians from eastern Anatolia.
Some scholars believe that the plans for these genocidal measures had been laid long before the war by the Young Turks; others that they were the perverse product of defeat and ambition. What the government rationalized to Western diplomats, like American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, as a military necessity, flowed from the Young Turks' imperial ambitions and distorted perceptions of the Armenian people. Deportations were accompanied by massacres, a massive attack on women and children, a ruthless program of murder and pillage, and forced marches of t le survivors into the deserts of Syria. At war on two fronts, the Turkish government used the opportunity to rid Anatolia once and for all of the one people that stood in the way of the Young Turks' plans for a Pan-Turkic empire. By the end of the war 90 percent of all Ottoman Armenians were gone from their historic homeland.
That was and remains the Armenian past. Indelibly etched into Armenian experience and memory, it is an irremovable part of how Armenians think of themselves—as the victims of a vicious state-initiated program of extermination. The sense of victimization, even martyrdom, that Armenians experience is all the more intense because the crime of genocide against them has been audaciously denied by the Turkish government and "scholarly" establishment. It has been denigrated by pseudo-scholars in the West and flagrantly trivialized by the governments, like the United States, which steadfastly refuse to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Turks have accused them of terrorism, drug-running, and even instigating the Kurdish insurrection, and Turkish newspapers regularly run inflammatory articles against Armenians. Denial has dragged on for decades and has itself shaped Armenian perceptions. The world seems not to care, to be indifferent to suffering, particularly of a small nation.
Enormous quantities of Armenian energy and hours of Armenian time have been taken up in lobbying, demonstrating, and protesting denial. Much of the focus of Armenian activity has been concentrated on Turkey and Turks, the victimizes, and a syndrome of hostility and hatred has infected one generation of Armenians after another. Even after 1991 when Armenians had new opportunities to build an independent state, with all the attendant problems of war, blockade, and economic collapse, it has proven impossible to free the community, particularly in the diaspora, from deep focus on Genocide and victimization. Not only can Armenians not forget—they certainly shouldn't; not only do many of them find it impossible to forgive—how do you forgive without acknowledgement or apology; but they are often so consumed by the memory of Genocide that they cannot conceive of new ways of dealing with old issues.
Like many other Armenians, I grew up hearing about Turkish atrocities. I vividly remember my grandmother tell about the death of her sister in the 1894-1896 massacres; how her throat was slit and she was thrown into a pit; how at night Armenians came down from the hills to search for the dead and wounded; how they found her and tried to stop up her wound with a dirty rag; and how they watched her die. As a boy the only way I could imagine Turks was mixed in with the television images of Nazis.
For years I "knew" what 1 needed to know about the Genocide and the Turks. When I began studying Armenian history in graduate school, and then teaching it at a university, 1 learned that simple, almost racist, views of the perpetrators of the massacres and Genocide did not explain very much. Students needed to understand more fully how ordinary people were able to murder their neighbors and why governments fired up by nationalism could order systematic killing of one part of their population. Somehow there had to be explanation of what drove people to these extraordinary acts. Understanding motives, 1 realized, was not justification of action, but understanding was essential if such things were to be prevented in the future.
Last year I accepted an invitation to speak at a private university in Istanbul. Standing before an audience of about 150 students and faculty, I began with words that could not have been heard before in Turkey.
"Historians have analyzed the massive deportation and killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in eastern Anatolia in 1915 as the conflict of two exclusivist nationalisms, the conflict of two people over a single piece of territory. Carrying that view slightly further, those who would deny that a genocide took place have interpreted these events as a civil war between Turks and Armenians. What I will argue is quite different. Rather than a civil war, which indeed never took place and exists only in the imagination of professional falsifiers, the genocide occurred when state authorities decided to remove the Armenians from what had been their historic homeland in order to realize a number of strategic goals - the elimination of a perceived Armenian threat to the war against Russia, to punish Armenians for activities which the Turkish authorities believed to be rebellious and subversive, and to realize their ambitions to create a Pan-Turkic empire that would extend from Anatolia through the Caucasus to Central Asia."
I spoke for an hour. Several people walked out. A Turkish faculty member that 1 had met just before the lecture looked particularly grim through the entire talk. But the audience was extraordinarily attentive, and when I finished they applauded. I answered questions for another hour and was surprised that the questions were not only not hostile but that the young audience seemed to accept the argument that a genocide had occurred and that it had been initiated and carried out by the Young Turk government. The very first question, from a student, was, what can we do now about this matter? How do we get beyond the hostility between Armenians and Turks? At some point during the questions-and-answers I mentioned that my mother's father had come from Yozgat, my mother's mother from Diarbekir, the town that the Armenians called "Dikranagert." They had left Turkey after the massacres of 1894-1896 and 1909, but all of their relatives left behind were murdered during the Genocide. The stillness with which those personal remarks were received left me with the clear impression that few in that audience doubted that what I had related about 1915 was true.
The reaction from some Armenians on my return was quite different. Rather than see the invitation, the talk, and the reception by the students as a breakthrough, they denounced the visit as proof of a conspiracy, of collaboration of an Armenian with the traditional enemy, part of a "Turkish strategy" for denying the Genocide. The very idea of talking to Turks was considered anathema. My own view is that this reaction reflects a deep pathology among some Armenians who have an immutable view of Turks, one that ascribes to them uniformly a deep hatred of Armenians. It claims that Turks, all Turks, are almost congenitally anti-Armenian. If I believed that, of course, I would not have gone to Turkey. I would not have tried to discuss complex historical issues with Turkish students. What I found in Turkey was a variety of views on Armenians and on the historical past, some of them absurd and fantastic, others quite reasonable. There are Turks who fanatically deny the Genocide against all the evidence. But there are also Turks, many of them intellectuals and scholars, who are trying under nearly impossible political conditions to rethink their history, even the history of the Ottoman mass murders.
Present-day Turkey is an authoritarian, militarized state with a repressive political apparatus, a state capable of the brutal repression of millions of Kurds, of imprisoning critical journalists, and torturing its own people. But it is not a totalitarian state in which all dissent, all discussion, is prohibited. There are cracks in the press and in universities through which controversial issues are quietly aired. After my visit to Istanbul, a major Turkish daily newspaper, Milliyet, published a long interview with me about the Genocide. In an atmosphere of censorship and repeated crackdowns, there are moments of possibility for some to think differently. As a Western scholar and an Armenian who hopes that his people can move beyond the frustrating circular movements around this painful issue, I believe we should not turn our backs on those courageous Turks who are trying to create a freer intellectual life in their country. By opening this dialogue Armenians do not only help Turks, they help themselves.
In a real sense Armenians are a people grieving for the generations that were never born, for a lost country, and a history that might have turned out differently. They are in mourning and have been for eight decades. The mourning process, we are told by psychologists, must be carried through to the end. Step by painful step one has to experience the grief, recognize the loss, accept what has happened, and move on. When such recognition and acceptance does not occur, the mourning process is left incomplete and grief cannot be put behind. It remains an ever-painful presence, a burden that cannot be put down, and instead of a normal and healthy life a person or nation may experience the trauma of loss over and over again.
Armenian mourning cannot be fully brought to completion until the world at large, most importantly Turkey and the United States, recognize and acknowledge the horrors that befell the Armenians in 1915. But at the same time why should Armenians remain imprisoned in their grief and at the mercy of others? Is it not possible for us to begin our own healing? To talk out, learn more, begin a dialogue, and move beyond the frustrating limits of how we have seen ourselves for so long? With the long historical experience that Armenians have gone through, they certainly can preserve the memory of their past, free it of debilitating hatreds that harm them as much as they do their foes, and look more confidently toward the next millennium.
The question that still haunts me is the one that the Turkish student asked in Istanbul: How do we get beyond the hostility between Armenians and Turks? My answer was that Turks would have to recognize and acknowledge what had happened; they had to learn to live with the truth about their own history. Scholars on both sides have to investigate, discuss, and debate in an atmosphere of openness and (as much as possible) dis-passion. Ultimately, it would be up to diplomats and statesmen to deal with the hard issues of compensation, but ordinary people do not have to wait for the slow wheels of government to grind. They can themselves learn as much as they can about the Genocide, read and discuss, and in small ways push back the curtain of forgetfulness. They can examine their own attitudes toward people that we have despised too long and differentiate between those who perpetuate lies and those who seek truth. It is not Turkey or Turks who are the enemies of the Armenians but those Turks in and out of government who promote lies about the past and applaud a powerful state's repression of minorities in 1915 and at the present time.
Eighty years after the events, the Genocide looms like a spectre dividing Turks and Armenians, Armenia and Turkey. Denial and refusal to discuss limits the options of states and raises ever higher the walls between neighbors. Unexamined hatreds poison personalities and foster violence, both verbal and physical. The issue of the Genocide itself has been used cynically by people who think that they alone "own" the Genocide and can pronounce on it to attack those with divergent views. Both Armenians and Turks are imprisoned by a horrendous experience about which they know too little. Today they stand at a crossroads. One road leads to further fighting and division, recriminations and denials. The other road - certainly the rockier - leads to dialogue and acknowledgement. The generation that experienced the Genocide has given way to those who have tried to keep the memory alive. Close behind are the generations that must move beyond memory to understanding, recognition, and resolution.
