They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else
Part 2

2,654 words

Part 1

That the Hamidian Massacres of the 1890s resulted in up to 300,000 Armenian deaths and did not spark either a civil war or a widespread Armenian exodus from the Empire is evidence that the Armenians had been a diaspora for so long that many of them had lost the will—or forgotten how—to defend themselves.

Centuries of lacking their own state must have whittled away at their self-esteem to the point that, even on the eve of the genocide in 1915, most of the Armenian leadership was still advocating for passivity, cooperation, and negotiation with their eventual killers. Yes, they did fight back at times, notably in 1901 and 1904 in the mountain town of Sasun, where dozens of Armenian guerrillas defended a monastery from thousands of Ottoman troops and Kurdish irregulars. In 1909 in the coastal city of Adana in the Cilician region of southeastern Anatolia, thousands of armed Armenians held off attacks by Turkish citizens and later by Ottoman soldiers. Just the fact that Armenians had been arming themselves for self-defense was considered a provocation and caused urban riots to deteriorate into a bloody pogrom. The Ottoman authorities also spread the false rumor that the Armenians intended to break off the from Empire and reestablish their ancient kingdom of Cilicia, which only further enflamed the Turks. The resulting savagery and slaughter, in which between 20,000 and 30,000 were killed, was later called the “Cilician Vespers,” after the Sicilian Vespers, the bloody thirteenth-century rebellion against the French-born king of Sicily in which 13,000 French were killed. Adana also represents the first time in the 20th century that the term “holocaust” was used to describe mass killings.

And yes, there were a few Armenian terrorists, such as the gang which, in 1896, seized the Bank Ottoman in Istanbul (setting off a massacre of 5,000 Armenians in the city). But according to Suny and the plethora of historians he cites, the Armenian millet was largely innocent of the treachery the Turks were accusing them of. Tellingly, an American physician in Anatolia in 1908 reported that Abdulhamid had ordered this authorities to deliberately provoke the Armenians so to provide a pretext for massacre. But the Armenians did not take the bait because they were deeply religious and disapproved of terrorism.

So what gave them hope that the Turks could be appeased?

By the 20th century, the Young Turks had emerged as a modernizing influence among the Turkish elite. In many ways they were materialist social Darwinists who pushed for technological reform and wished to return to the more egalitarian Tanzimat period of the mid-19th century. They also had no love for Islam, although they were perfectly willing to use it as Abdulhamid II had done as a binding force for empire. At first, the socialist and crypto-nationalistic Dashnak party, the main political organ of the Ottoman Armenians, cooperated with the Young Turks since they shared common goals, which included the ouster of the Hamidian regime. The 1908 coup d’état granted them their wish. So connected were the Young Turks with the Dashnaks that when supporters of Abdulhamid II launched a counterrevolution in 1909 and temporarily ousted the Young Turks, their main figures such as Talat Bey and Dr. Nazim hid in the homes of prominent Dashnaks.

A primal aspect of human nature is to make firm friend-enemy distinctions during times of existential crisis. As the Balkan Wars, and—more importantly—the First World War raged, the Young Turks began to do exactly that, rapidly shedding ties established through culture or ideology, and forming new ones based on the deepest tie of all—race. That the Ottomans were losing these wars, and along with them their empire, made this transition all the more stark and irreversible. Most of the Young Turks grew up in the Balkans, which they called Rumelia. They were, in effect, homeless on the eve of the world war, as were hundreds of thousands of their countrymen who flooded into Anatolia as refugees telling tales of European atrocities. The Young Turks couldn’t even lay this at the feet of Christians since Muslim Albanians had joined the infidel horde against them. So much for ties based on religion. There may have been some Young Turks who held fast to their modern, progressive ideals, but their core constituents, the ones with the greatest will to power such as the triumvirate of Talat Bey, Enver Bey, and Cemal Bey, must have decided at some point that either the Turks would be dominant in Anatolia, or no one would be.

Ominously for the Armenians, however, it was not the Ottomanist majority, but the nationalist minority, at the Congress that actually represented the more powerful, even dominant, tendency in most of the Young Turk committees and newspapers. In the first decade of the twentieth century the ground eroded under the Ottomanist orientation. Sabahaddin and the liberals were committed to a multinational society that recognized both equality and difference among the millets. . . . His moderate, inclusive policies infuriated his more nationalist compatriots, who saw them as ranging from “elastic, vague and obscure” to treacherously akin to the views of the Armenians. The radical doctors Baheddin Şakir and Nazim accused the prince of being “a British agent” who “approved of the program of the Armenians, who want to leave us.” To finish him off, they brought up that fact that he was Georgian, not a pure Turk.

Over time most Turkish activists gravitated to a more nationalist position in which the superiority of the ethnic Turks (already implicit in Ottomanism itself) and their privileged position within the state were more explicitly underlined.

The Young Turks seized back control of Istanbul in 1913 with the obsessive desire to preserve their multiethnic empire and forcibly restore Turkish dominance. Imperialism and ethnocentrism, however, are utterly contradictory, and the resulting square-peg-round-hole difficulties made the Young Turks both desperate and murderous. After abolishing the last vestiges of liberalism, instituting widespread censorship, and forming a one-party state, they released thousands from state prisons and groomed them as personal assassins or terrorist guards to do whatever dirty work that needed to be done. They also invested heavily in their military. Meanwhile there was open talk of the mass killing of Armenians as well as accurate predictions of genocide. An editorial in an Armenian newspaper claimed that

Turkish nationalism, which, today, has the government of the country in its grip, will, without hesitation, ruthlessly massacre the Armenians, as a historical necessity. And, this time, it will massacre them more mercilessly than in 1895-1896, more violently than during the Catastrophe of Adana.

The final straw appears to be the inspectors general that the European powers insisted be installed to oversee a peaceful resolution to the Armenian Question. How could the Turks even dream of being supreme in their own homeland when foreigners and infidels can boss them around like this? They were so far in debt to the Europeans they could do nothing about it. Most notably, the Germans had made huge investments in the Baghdad Railroad, which ran straight through Anatolia. Even worse, their hated enemies, the Russians, were part of this scheme. With their 1878 defeat in the Russo-Turkish War still burning within living memory, the humiliation felt by the Turkish elite must have been unbearable. In late 1913, Cemal Bey bluntly told a prominent Dashnak that 300,000 to 400,000 Armenians would be massacred if they insisted upon such “European controls.”

Some Armenians however did not seem to take this threat very seriously and doubled down on their calls for foreign interference, which incensed the Young Turks. Even worse, the Europeans had wanted Armen Garo, one of the terrorists behind the Bank Ottoman seizure, to serve as their assistant. As would be expected, Garo and Talat Bey hated one another, as evidenced by the following encounter depicted by Suny:

The meeting went badly, with both sides throwing bitter accusations at each other. Talat likened himself to Bismarck, the architect of the modern German Empire. Garo challenged the minister’s grandiose plans to assimilate the Kurds and “empty Armenia of Armenians, so that you will be rid of the Armenian question once and for all.” He warned, “We will not allow you that much time to realize your plans. Our national consciousness is so far advanced that we will prefer to demolish this great edifice called the Ottoman Empire, rather than permit you to see Armenia without Armenians […] We will not permit you to drive our working people out of our ancient land, for the benefit of nomadic Kurds and Muhajirs from Rumeli.” Turning red in the face, Talat suddenly rose and, claiming to have another appointment, abruptly left.

Of course, as an ethnonationalists myself I am in full sympathy with the Armenian in this exchange, but without hundreds of thousands of Armenian men in arms at his disposal, Armen Garo was boxing well above his weight class. This foolishness was punished once the Ottomans entered the war on the side of the Central Powers, in part because the Entente bore greater responsibility for these hated inspections.

As the war raged, Turkish concerns that Armenians in the east would welcome rather than resist the Russians had some basis in truth. However the vast majority of Armenians during the time remained passive or neutral, or indeed aided the war effort in the military. And the Young Turks knew this.

Telegrams from Istanbul and the provinces, rumors, and bulletins by officers and officials, told of Armenian treachery and insurrection. There was no revolt, however, no organized uprising, no coordinated Armenian insurrection led by the remnants of the Armenian political parties. The purported rebellion was a fiction concocted and spread largely by military communiqués[…] Later testimony at the trial of Ottoman officials after the war revealed that elaborate and dramatic stories of insurrection had been fabricated and transmitted.

After Enver got smashed by the Russians at Sarikamiş in eastern Anatolia in January 1915, he blamed Armenian treachery for the defeat, despite having blundered his way into it himself. This sealed the fate of Ermeni millet. In April 2015, the Young Turks led by Talat decided to deport the Armenians from their vilayets into the Syrian desert. Across official channels they insisted that no undue harm befall them while in transit, but over unofficial channels, they ordered their secret paramilitaries to do them in. The ones they didn’t kill would eventually starve. “Burn, demolish, kill,” read one note in particular. To keep resistance to a minimum they disarmed all Armenian soldiers, relegated them to work battalions, and then slaughtered them by the thousands. They also arrested and murdered leading Armenian political figures and intellectuals in the major cities.

Talat Bey was especially frank about all of this and explained much of his rationale to American ambassador Henry Morgenthau. No discussion of the Armenian Genocide can be complete without the insights of Morgenthau, who kept copious notes on the genocide as it was happening. Suny claims that “as a contemporary witness Morgenthau’s account influenced generations of readers, including historians, and in many ways created the template through which the Genocide has been understood.”

From a historical standpoint, the Jewish Morgenthau is an interesting character. As the US Secretary of the Treasury in the 1930s he served as one of the prime architects of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s disastrous New Deal. He also financed a good deal of US participation in the Second World War, and afterwards authored the infamous Morgenthau Plan, which proposed to deal harshly with a defeated Nazi Germany. It was ultimately rejected by the Americans for being potentially genocidal. Yet in the pages of They Can Live in the Desert Morgenthau is as race-realist as they come, especially when describing Turks:

Morgenthau’s text is replete with indelible characteristics of “the Turk.” “Psychologically primitive,” the Turk is essentially “a bully and a coward; he is brave as a lion when things are going his way, but cringing, abject, and nerveless when reverses are overwhelming him.” The Ottomans reverted in the war years to an older ancestral type: “the basic fact underlying the Turkish mentality is its utter contempt for all other races. A fairly insane pride is the element that largely explains this strange human species. The common term applied by the Turk to the Christian is ‘dog’[…] he actually looks down upon his European neighbor as far less worthy of consideration than his own domestic animals.

Morgenthau believed that the driving force behind the Young Turks was “an insatiable lust for personal power.” While justifying his actions in direct conversation with Morgenthau, Talat admitted many of the reasons listed above. When Morgenthau tried to argue, Talat shut him down:

It is no use for you to argue […] we have already disposed of three quarters of the Armenians; there are none at all left in Bitlis, Van, and Erzeroum. The hatred for the Turks and the Armenians is now so intense that have got to finish with them. If we don’t they will plan their revenge.

In a darkly humorous twist, Talat once had the audacity to ask Morgenthau if US relief funds and premiums from American insurance companies earmarked for Armenians be paid to Turks instead, “since the Armenians no longer had any need for them.”

If there is a central motif in They Can Live in the Desert it’s that the suspicion, envy, hatred, and contempt for Armenians was widespread across the Ottoman Empire. The Turks may have felt it the most, but other Muslim populations did as well, especially the Kurds. As the Empire began its precipitous decline in the mid-19th century it took very little for ordinary Ottomans to act murderously towards Armenians regardless of pretext, if any existed at all. This only got worse during the First World War. Certainly we can look to all the reasons listed above for an explanation, and we should have no reason to doubt that Morgenthau’s negative assessment of the Young Turks was correct. But something must also be said about the Turkish character which simply did not seem to blink at atrocity as it unfolded in plain sight.

That so few Turks denounced the genocide as it was happening—and that so many had actually joined in the carnage—sadly indicates that the Young Turks, for all their grandiose pretensions, were indeed acting on behalf of their people. This is, at least, how Ronald Suny presents it. An Armenian survivor relates how, upon one of the marches into the desert, a police captain had explained why the Turks killed women and children. “If we only killed men and not the women and children, then 50 years from now we would have a couple million Armenians.” This police officer then casually admitted that he had ordered the deaths of 40,000 Armenians.

There are scenes in They Can Live in the Desert depicting Armenian slaughter of Turks and Kurds, usually with only hundreds rather than thousands killed. But Suny points out that in most cases, women and children were spared.

I will end part two of my review with perhaps the most unsettling paragraph in the entire book:

Officers, officials, and ordinary people participated in mass killing, plunder, and rape for myriad reasons, from sadism to personal profiteering to fulfillment of duty. The kaymakam [governor] of Tel Abiad in the Syrian desert watched with indifference as people died all around him. He told a German engineer, “My heart is not as sensitive as that of the Europeans; it doesn’t bother me to watch these people dying.” The same engineer, a Herr Bastendorff, reported that the supervisor over the Armenians in Ras ul Ain “even declared in the presence of our doctor Farah, that it always gave him great pleasure to deflower Armenian girls under the age of 12 years.” The director of emigrants, Şükri Bey, told him, “The final result must be the extermination of the Armenian race. It is the continual battle between the Muslims and the Armenians that is now being finally fought. The weaker of the two must be the one to go.”