Meanwhile, in Anatolia (Asia Minor) a more moderate group of “Young Turks” took over. After lengthy negotiations, this government signed in 1920 the Treaty of Sevres which reduced Turkey to a shadow of itself, re-created a large Republic of Armenia, and called for a referendum to be organized among the Kurdish populations in and around Anatolia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria to determine if an independent Kurdistan was desired.
However, the treaty was flatly rejected by another group of highly nationalistic officers. Led by Mustafa Kemal, they successfully waged war on France, Armenia, and Greece to force renegotiation of the Serves treaty. The result was the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne which effectively created the boundaries of modern Turkey, left a rump Armenia as part of the emerging Soviet Union, and scuttled the referendum on Kurdistan, leaving the Kurds the largest ethnic group with no independent homeland.
Did the Ottoman Rulers Commit Genocide? This, then, brings us back to the question of what makes mass murder or massacres genocide. The distinction hinges on discovering or discerning the “intent” of those doing the killing, as is clear from Article II of the 1948 Convention Against Genocide: “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such….”Arriving at a conclusion, unless proclamations or other statements of intent have been published, can be problematical before the fact of a genocide starting. For those with time and inclination, being familiar with the circumstances of 20th century genocides and massacres might permit earlier scrutiny of causes and processes that led to the horrendous slaughter of civilian’s in that century and that have carried over into the 21st century.
The first seven years of this century have already re-taught us the basic lesson that naming an atrocity genocide – as the U.S. did in the Sudan – does not prevent or stop the killing, even with the possible penalties for any found guilty as described in international law.
Certainly, time does not appear to be a factor. In Rwanda 800,000-900,000 ethnic Tutsis and ethnic Hutus who refused to participate in the organized killing perished in the space of 100 days in 1994. But in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the executions and forced labor that eventually claimed 2 million intellectuals, city dwellers, and “elites” ran four years (1975-1979).
The numbers who perish also is non-determinative as to whether genocide has been committed. In 2004, Germany acknowledged as a genocide the 1904 systematic destruction of 80,000 Herero tribesmen in what was then called German Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia) in retaliation for the deaths of 100 Germans killed when the Africans rebelled against brutal German rule.
Contrast this event with what Joseph Stalin was doing in the Soviet Union in 1932-33.
He purposefully condemned to death by starvation 7 million men, women and children in the Ukraine where his program to collectivize agriculture was being resisted, sometimes violently. Tiring of the unceasing defiance, he ordered the Red army to seize every grain of the harvest of autumn and winter 1932 and to completely seal Ukraine’s border so no foodstuffs could enter Ukraine.
Furthermore, between 1934-1938, Stalin orchestrated a massive purge of Communist Party, members, the intelligentsia, and army officers whose loyalty to him he questioned. Some 13 million wee killed or sent to gulags. In the army the purge removed so many experienced officers that when the Nazis attacked in 1942, the Red army came perilously close to total collapse – which, had it happened, would have gone into history as one of the most egregious self-inflicted errors ever made in warfare. (As it was, the Russian people bolstered the army at both St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) and Moscow against the efforts of the Nazi armies.)
In terms of the number of people killed, Stalin is surpassed only by Mao Ze-Dong. Again, excluding the lives lost in Mao’s military campaigns against the Chinese Nationalists and the Imperial Japanese army in the 1930s and 1940s, the Chinese civilian population endured three major assaults – the subjugation of Tibet (1949-50), the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), and the Cultural Revolution (1966- 1969) – that claimed as many as 1.2 million, 43 million and 7 million lives, respectively.
War, of course, offers the perfect counterpoint by which murders and revenge slayings among civilians are concealed. The world knows so much about the World War II Holocaust in part because the Germans kept meticulous records on the 6 million souls – Jews, ethnic Poles, Romas (gypsies), and “undesirables” – exterminated during the period 1938-1945.
In the Pacific, Japanese troops are believed to have killed 300,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners in six weeks (December 1937- February 1938) in what is called the “Rape of Nanking.” The broad consensus today holds that over the entire 1937-1945 time frame of significant combat in Asia, non-combatant deaths due to Japanese invasion, occupation, and execution is approximately 6.8 million.
(In 1984, UNESCO estimated the total number of civilian fatalities during 1937-1945 at between 21-27 million – nearly the same as military losses.)
The World War II examples share a common characteristic: both occurred within the conscious context of “low level” combat or preparation for escalating armed conflicts when tensions already would be high and moral restraints weakened. Yet while the deaths of 6 million at the hands of the Nazis earn the condemnation of “genocide” by ordinary men and women, of religious and secular leaders around the globe, most of the other atrocities – at least as they are spoken of and written about – do not carry the stigma of “genocide.”
Genocide: Avoiding the Specific (Turkey) While Condemning the UniversalThe Armenian genocide, for the Turks, arguably also shares this association with war and “defense of the nation-state” against internal subversion and should not be singled out as genocide. (The U.S. internment camps in World War II are a less drastic example of the same mind set.) As regrettable as the killings may be, the Turks see the deaths as part of the larger war they were waging against the imperial Russian army and, after Lenin’s successful revolution forced the new regime in St. Petersburg to withdraw its army, were still threatened by the new Communist regime.
The other and perhaps from the point of view of the Turkish people the more significant reason for rejecting these events as genocide is the belief that the reputation of Turkey’s “George Washington” – Ataturk – and through him the honor of the entire Turkish people would be sullied even though he did not emerge as the man in charge of the residual Ottoman empire until he led the opposition to the Sevres treaty during 19 20-1923..
