Revenge or Justice?

The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, by Eugene Rogan

I will come to the question posed in the title of this post shortly, but first the conclusion of the fall of the Ottomans. 

One by one, the Allies – led by Britain – took the major cities and regions of the Ottoman Empire: Baghdad, Gaza, and Jerusalem; the Sinai Peninsula.

“Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.”

Not much has changed in the last 100 years.

The story is punctuated with large cavalry charges – cavalry as in horses (and camels), not tanks; effective diversions; conflicting promises.  Death by the thousands and tens-of-thousands, on both sides.

The Ottomans were losing not only in the Middle East, but also eastern Anatolia.  Russia was making advances through Erzurum and Trabzon.  The Russians headed toward Mesopotamia; the British, concerned about their future claims, wanting to secure this region first.  Allies, yes – but competitors for empire first.

By the end of 1917, the Ottomans were fighting not for victory, but for survival.  Even with the withdrawal by Russia from the war, due to the Russian Revolution, it was too late for the Ottomans.  That the United States entered the war took away any advantage to the Germans.

As victory for the Allies seemed certain and was fast approaching, many wanted their cut – and decided to join Britain in the Middle East:

…two Jewish battalions of Royal Fusiliers, formed with the express intention of advancing the Zionist claim to Palestine by valour and sacrifice on the battlefield.  The French contributed the Détachement Français de Palestine et de Syrie to ensure that France protected its long-standing claims to Syria.  One regiment of the French detachment was made up entirely of Armenian refugees rescued by the French from the famous siege of Musa Dagh.  Amir Faysal was at the front of the line, with T. E. Lawrence as his advocate, to uphold Hashemite claims to rule Syria as part of a greater Arab Kingdom.

Both the Arabs and Armenians sent delegates to Paris for the Peace Conference.  The Arabs got nothing, the Armenians got a promise, one that didn’t come with any teeth and that the allies gave away in a subsequent treaty.  Which leads me to the subject hinted at in the title….

Since 1699, the Ottomans had lost most of the wars that they fought….

The empire was regularly shrinking.  The Armenians in eastern Anatolia represented perhaps the last great risk; call it genocide or not, but what was once an Armenian population of perhaps 2 million was reduced to perhaps 100,000 or less.  The Great War and aftermath truly represented an existential event for the Turks.  Had all enactments from Paris been enforced, Turkey would have been a stub – the western peninsula, with Istanbul even under foreign administration.

And then along came Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.  The hero of Gallipoli became the father of the Republic.  Shoving the Greeks off to the west, the French in the south, and the Armenians to the east, he secured Turkey in basically its current form.

That settled things in Turkey, but it didn’t settle things for many Armenians.  Call it revenge or call it justice; several Armenians went after many of the Turks that were the leading perpetrators of…well, the term “genocide” had not yet been coined, so we will refer to it using the terminology of the time:

…"massacres", "atrocities", "annihilation", "holocaust", "the murder of a nation", "race extermination" and "a crime against humanity".

First were trials, held in Turkey and for the purpose of prosecuting the perpetrators (and also, perhaps, with an eye on the hope that the trials would buy the Turks some western favor in the peace settlement).  Eighteen individuals were given the death sentence, yet fifteen of these were tried in absentia – having fled Turkey at the end of the war.  The three who remained were executed in Turkey.  The rest remained free.

Unwilling to watch the Young Turk leaders in exile escape justice, a group of Armenian militants from the Dashnak organization took the law into their own hands.  Between March 1921 and July 1922, the Dashnaks ordered a series of assassinations of key Young Turk leaders in a program known as “Operation Nemesis.”

Perhaps most well-known is the case of Soghomon Tehlirian:

Soghomon Tehlirian was an Armenian who assassinated Talaat Pasha, the former Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, in Berlin on March 15, 1921. The assassination was a part of Operation Nemesis, planned by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation as revenge for the Armenian Genocide orchestrated by the Ottoman Imperial Government during World War I. Talaat Pasha had been convicted and sentenced to death in absentia in the Turkish courts-martial of 1919–20, and was viewed as the main orchestrator of the genocide. After a two-day trial Tehlirian was found not guilty by the German court, and freed. Tehlirian is considered a national hero by Armenians.

The orders to Tehlirian were as follows:

…"you blow up the skull of the Number One nation-murderer and you don't try to flee. You stand there, your foot on the corpse and surrender to the police, who will come and handcuff you."

And so it went.  Arshavir Shiragian took part in three assassinations – one in Rome, two in Berlin; the assassination of Cemal took place in Tbilisi, Georgia.  Enver eluded assassination, but died in Central Asia while fighting the Bolsheviks.  Altogether, by 1926 ten of the eighteen men convicted in the trials were dead.

Conclusion

So…revenge or justice?

Gallipoli

The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, by Eugene Rogan

The British War Council met in London on 2 January 1915 to consider an urgent war request for assistance from the commander in chief of the Russian army.

As recently as 27 December, the Russians were on the verge of being encircled by the Ottoman Army in the Caucasus.  After deliberations, Britain initiated planning for the Dardanelles campaign.  Unknown to the British, by the time of this War Council meeting, Russia was on the verge of total victory.  Yet, learning of this shortly thereafter, the British decided to forge ahead anyway – as fateful and disastrous a decision as any taken on the western front.

Field Marshall Kitchener was the loudest voice in the Council.  He felt a naval operation along the Mediterranean coast would be sufficient to draw Ottoman troops away from the Russians and the Caucasus due to fear of risk to the capital, Istanbul.  Kitchener turned to Winston Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty, tasking him to measure the feasibility of the endeavor.  Churchill raised the stakes: more than just bombing coastal positions why not force the Straits and go on to the capital?

The Dardanelles run over forty miles from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Marmara; at the Narrows, the distance between the shores of Europe and Asia is as little as 1.600 yards.  The path was strewn with undersea mines.

Admiral Carden replied to Churchill: the Straits could be forced with naval power alone.  But by this time, news came of the Russian successes.  So the objective changed: instead of going now to aid their Russian allies, the British would go to conquer a weakened Turkey, believed to be on the brink of collapse.

The French promised full support in the Mediterranean, and the Russians promised to simultaneously attack the northern Straits from the Black Sea.  And, as was expected for the time, the Allies immediately went into negotiations to divide up the soon-to-be dissolved remains of the Ottoman Empire.

By early February, the British and French had massed their fleets in the Mediterranean. They would soon come to conclude that some ground troops might actually be necessary in the assault; between the British and the French, soon over 60,000 troops would be assembled.

Naval operations began on 19 February – eighteen battleships, including the massive Queen Elizabeth.  With a range farther than the capability of the Turkish guns onshore, the navy was free to fire without risk.  Only when British ships approached the shore to assess the damage, the Turkish gunners returned fire.

News of the attack panicked Istanbul.  The Ottoman government and the palace left the city and set up shop in Anatolia; the treasury was doing the same with its gold.  The British were anticipating a government crisis that would topple the Young Turk government.

And then catastrophe for the British and French.  On 18 March, several ships were able to enter the Straits – to include the Queen Elizabeth.  After being hit by Turkish shelling, the French ship Bouvet turned to leave the Straits.  Then it all really went bad: being carried downstream by the strong currents, it struck a mine. 

The explosion blew a hole in the hull; the ship capsized within two minutes with nearly all of its crew of 724 trapped inside – and then it immediately plunged to the ocean floor.  Sixty-two men survived.

The Allies were caught by surprise with the mine explosion; it hadn’t dawned on them that the Ottomans might lay new mines after the British finished sweeping operations days earlier.  These new mines caught the Bouvet, and would quickly strike the Inflexible, Irresistible, and Ocean.  Four ships in a matter of a few hours.

And this was before artillery fire from the shore struck the Suffren and Gaulois.  Even the Queen Elizabeth suffered five hits.  All Allied ships were recalled from the Straits, escaping to safety.

Three battleships sunk, three others badly damaged; over 1,000 lives lost and hundreds wounded.  One-third of the Allied battle fleet was lost in a single day – with nothing to show for the effort.  The events of 18 March brought to an end the naval campaign.  Not leaving bad enough alone, the Allies began to work out a land campaign; after all, to withdraw after such a disastrous defeat would not be honorable.

The Allies took one month to develop their battle plan.  The Turks, aided by German military officers, took the month to fortify their positions.  On 25 April the assault began.  From the beginning, nothing went to plan – with results as disastrous and futile as those realized in the naval campaign.

The Road to Genocide

Or…try living life as a minority in a dying empire…

The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, by Eugene Rogan

We are now at the end of the Second Balkan War.  Having recovered some of the previously lost territories, there was a new sense of optimism.  For decades, the outskirts of Empire were whittled away, mostly by colonial Western powers – a dying empire.  The end result of this most recent war was to turn the tide…if only momentarily.

The Ottomans were determined to play both sides against the other in the fast-approaching war, delaying for an extended period any real commitment to one side or the other.  Ultimately, there was only one choice that was likely.

On the one hand, Britain, France and Russia; on the other, Germany.  The Triple Entente was represented by the colonialists: France and Britain already making moves on Ottoman territories, Russia, the perennial foe, with an eye on the Straits and the Christian communities in Eastern Anatolia – bordering the Russian Caucasus Mountains.  The Entente powers might talk nice in order to win the Ottomans to their cause, but their actions spoke louder than words.

It was not helpful when the two state-of-the-art dreadnoughts – commissioned by the Ottomans, scheduled for delivery by the British shipbuilders Vickers and Armstrong in July 1914 – were requisitioned by the British shortly before the (ever-delayed) scheduled delivery. 

The day after the British decision, the Ottomans concluded a secret treaty of alliance with Germany, a nation with whom they already held a close relationship.  While the Germans would be the strong friend that the Ottomans needed, the Muslims might prove to be the right ally for the Germans in their fight against the colonialist British and French – and the envious Russians.

Once war would later break out, the Germans established a jihad bureau in Berlin, dedicated to producing pan-Islamic propaganda; they treated Muslim POWs (captured while fighting for colonial Britain) with respect toward their Islamic traditions, hoping to convince them to switch sides and fight for the German cause.

The Germans had previously established a military mission to the Ottoman Empire at the end of 1913.  Otto Liman von Sanders was nominated; he was appointed command over the forces that secured the Straits.  To the Russians, this was tantamount to the Germans having control over the Straits – an intolerable situation.

Two German ships, the heavy battleship Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau, were brought into the Straits – this in order to protect them from the more capable ships of Britain and France.  The Ottomans demanded significant concessions from the Germans in order to allow this escape; the Germans had little choice but to agree.  The ships were to be flown under Ottoman flag, in some manner replacing the two ships confiscated by the British.

Consider the accomplishments by the so-called sick man of Europe: they secured an alliance with a powerful European power in order to protect their territory from Russian aggression; they had mobilized their armed forces; they acquired modern warships.  They did all this without having to get entangled in any actual war-fighting!

But war did break out: North Africa lost; Mesopotamia occupied.  The Russians made advances through the Caucasus and into eastern Anatolia, with the Ottoman forces being routed in the initial conflicts; the British attacked at Gallipoli, where the defenses – directed by the Germans – held.  There were times on both fronts where the end of Ottoman rule seemed inevitable.

What does this have to do with genocide?  The Christian Armenian minority in Turkey numbered something approaching 2 million at the start of the Great War.  By the end of the war, the number could be counted in the tens-of-thousands.  The vast majority were killed or forced out in mass-migration.

I have written about this genocide three years ago – at the time of the 100^th anniversary commemoration.  I based my post on a chapter from Rogan’s book – a book that only now I am returning to.  I took advantage of the commemoration to skip ahead in the book…after which it remained on my shelf for too long.

For those who believe “diversity” is marvelous or that open borders for people with vastly different cultural values and traditions is the path to peace and liberty, consider living in a place – especially a dying empire – where you are the minority.  Consider what happens when the inevitable scapegoating begins. 

There are too many examples in history that demonstrate the disaster for those who find themselves in this situation.  What happened to the Armenians (and other Christian populations in the region) is just one example.

The Dying Days of Empire

The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, by Eugene Rogan

Between 1908 and 1913, the Ottoman Empire faced grave internal and external threats.

That’s putting it mildly.  The Young Turk Revolution; domestic reformers; European Imperial Powers; the Balkan Wars; Armenians and Arabs seeking greater autonomy.

On July 23 1908, Sultan Abdülhamid II convened a cabinet meeting.  The Ottoman army in Macedonia demanded a return to the constitution of 1876.  Some background on the Ottoman Constitution:

…Western educated Armenians of the Ottoman Empire drafted the Armenian National Constitution in 1863. The Ottoman Constitution of 1876 was under direct influence of the Armenian National Constitution and its authors. The Ottoman Constitution of 1876 itself was drawn up by Western educated Ottoman Armenian Krikor Odian, who was the advisor of Midhat Pasha.

The constitution remained in effect for two years.  Both before and immediately after adoption of the constitution, the empire was in turmoil: the treasury declared bankruptcy in 1875; the first session of the newly elected Ottoman parliament was held on 19 March 1877; war with Russia began shortly thereafter.

The edges of empire: Russian and Ottoman (and in prior years, Persian).  Russia viewed itself as the successor to Byzantium, protector of Orthodox Christendom; perhaps more important to Russia: the Straits and access to the Mediterranean.

Russia declared war on the Ottomans in April 1877 and attacked through the Balkans and also through the Caucasus.  By January 1878, Russia had reached the outskirts of Istanbul; an armistice was accepted.  In February, the Sultan suspended the Constitution.  A result of the subsequent peace treaty: the Ottoman Empire lost two-fifths of its territory (in the Balkans and in eastern Anatolia) and one-fifth of its population.

Shortly thereafter, Britain secured Cyprus, France occupied Tunisia, and Britain placed Egypt under colonial rule.  These events convinced the Sultan that he needed to rule with an iron hand.  And this iron hand brought forward revolutionary elements, most importantly the Young Turks and its secret society, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).

This movement was born in Macedonia, and it was due to the agitation of members of this movement that the aforementioned cabinet meeting on 23 July 1908 was held.  The end result was the restoration of the Constitution.  The Young Turks were seen as leaders of this revolution.  The leaders were best known as Cemal, Talat and Enver. 

Banners in every city proclaimed “Justice, Equality, and Fraternity.”  This in an empire that included Muslims (both Shia and Sunni; Turkic, Arab and Kurd), Christians (of different communions), and Jews.  This in an empire where non-Muslims were treated as second-class by both the law and by the broader Muslim population. 

It was a slogan that would both raise expectations in the minorities and be seen as a threat to the majority.  And the consequences for the minorities was less than pleasant, to say the least.  But I am getting ahead of the story.

The Young Turk revolution inspired hope and freedom for many – Muslim and Christian alike.  For the most part, the raised hopes ended in disillusionment.  No major changes in the government – as the Sultan was also the caliph, or spiritual head, of the Muslim world, he was left in place; the poor economy did not improve – it worsened, as lost confidence in the currency drove price inflation of 20 percent in two months.

Turkey’s European neighbors – far from supporting this move toward parliamentary democracy – took advantage of the turmoil to annex even more Ottoman territory: Bulgaria declared independence, the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, Crete announced union with Greece.

As the initial joy waned, the previously-existing political circles and influential elements of society increased their opposition to the changes.  Counter-revolution followed revolution; the Sultan took control for a short time – until the Ottoman Third Army in Macedonia once again exerted control.  Martial law was declared; the Sultan was deposed, replaced by his younger brother.

The back-and-forth-and-back again exposed the deep rifts in Ottoman society, most significantly the Turkish-Armenian antagonism.  Muslims crowds massacred thousands of Christian Armenians in the southeastern city of Adana.  Such atrocity had roots in earlier years, but within a few short years would grow into what is referred to as the first genocide of the twentieth century.

The fear was that the Armenians had a nationalist agenda.  Certainly, the Armenians had a distinct faith, ethnicity, and language.  They lacked only one thing that would be somewhat necessary – they were not concentrated in one geographic area; they were dispersed in parts of the Russian and Ottoman Empires.  The largest concentration was in Istanbul. 

The Fall of the Ottomans

The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, by Eugene Rogan

In this book, Eugene Rogan tells the story of the Great War in the Middle East – not from the side of the Great Powers, but from the side of the Ottomans.

He begins with the story of his great-uncle, Lance Corporal John McDonald.  His great-uncle was born in a small Scottish village.  Along with his friend, Charles Beveridge, McDonald enlisted with the 8^th Scottish Rifles (the “Cameronians”) when war broke out.

They said farewell to friends and family on 17 May 1915, headed to the eastern Mediterranean.  They arrived at the Greek island of Lemnos, the staging post for British and Allied forces, on 29 May – one month after the fighting on Gallipoli had broken out.  By mid-June they sailed onward to the peninsula.

Passing some who had returned from the fighting, the fresh-faced recruits would shout out: “Are we downhearted?  No!”  In reply, “some Australian wag” shouted back, “Well you damned soon will be.”

On 14 June, the battalion was safely ashore, and four days later they were headed up Gully Ravine to the fighting.  On 28 June, following two hours of bombardment from the sea, the 8^th Scottish Rifles came out of their trenches and attacked.  Within five minutes, they were wiped out.  McDonald died in the camp hospital; the body of his friend Beveridge was never found, assumed to be in the unidentifiable conglomeration of remains buried in a mass grave only after the war.

The author, Rogan, went to Gallipoli in 2005 to see firsthand this place of infamy – and the site of his great-uncle’s death.  He was accompanied by his mother and his son, the first family visitors in nine decades.  While trying to find the Lancashire Landing Cemetery, they took a wrong turn and ended up at the Nuri Yamut Monument – a memorial to the Turkish war dead of the same battle in which his great-uncle died.

While my great-uncle’s unit suffered 1,400 casualties – half its total strength – and British losses overall reached 3,800, as many as 14,000 Ottomans fell dead and wounded at Gully Ravine….All the books I had read on the Cameronians treated the terrible waste of British life on the day my great-uncle died.  None of the English sources had mentioned the thousands of Turkish war dead.

It was this Ottoman front that turned the European war into what we now call a World War.  Certainly there were other battle lines outside of Europe, but none as devastating and devastated.  As if to emphasize the “world” participants, the author offers:

Australians and New Zealanders, every ethnicity in South Asia, North Africans, Senegalese and Sudanese made common cause with French, English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish soldiers against the Turkish, Arab, Kurdish, Armenian, and Circassian combatants in the Ottoman army and their German and Austrian allies.

Battles were fought in the territory of the modern states of Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran.

Of course, there was also an eastern front to the Ottoman war in which all of the same Ottoman combatants would fight against Russians and other minority populations of the Russian Empire.  It seems this region has been facing Armageddon for over 100 years – with armies from all around the world fighting over a few square miles of desert.

For the Ottoman Turks, this war was existential.  After reaching the peak of their power and territory in 1529, with Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent at the gates of Vienna, the Ottoman armies made their final push on Vienna in 1683 – with the empire spanning three continents.

Over the next two centuries, slowly and regularly, control over this territory was lost – Greece and the various Balkan provinces gained independence during the nineteenth century; Britain, France, and Russia controlled much of the rest.  The Ottomans were faced with internal and external threats – no longer the end of empire, but now facing the end of Turkish rule.

Now it is 1908.  We will pick up the story here next time.

A Genocide by Any Other Name….

Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944:

Genocide is the systematic destruction of all or a significant part of a racial, ethnic, religious or national group.

The UN defines genocide as:

…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

                               (a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Lemkin was asked how he came to be interested in the crime of genocide. He replied:

I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action.

April 24 is the date Armenians commemorate their genocide.  This year will mark 100 years.

The Armenian Genocide…was the Ottoman government's systematic extermination of its minority Armenian subjects inside their historic homeland which lies within the territory constituting the present-day Republic of Turkey. The total number of people killed as a result has been estimated at between 1 and 1.5 million. The starting date is conventionally held to be 24 April 1915, the day Ottoman authorities rounded up and arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople.

In addition to the historic tragedy, a review of this episode offers the opportunity to witness in real-time the impact of realpolitik on the writing and interpretation of history – a peek behind the curtains of the development of myth and the obfuscation of truth.  

Therefore, I will first review the tragic history, followed by a review of the current dialogue – greatly in the news now due to the aforementioned 100 year anniversary.

The History

The Fall of the Ottomans, Eugene Rogan

I have this book on my shelf, to be read.  The end of the Great War saw the end of several European empires; I have yet to do much work regarding the Ottoman.  I am not ready to start through the book, however, given the upcoming commemoration of the Armenian Genocide – as well as my recent posts on the Ukrainian Famines and Jewish Holocaust, putting me in the mood, I guess – I decided to take it off of the shelf and read (and comment on) chapter 7, “The Annihilation of the Armenians.”

I offer the following high-level and superficial summary leading up to this period: By 1915, the Ottoman Empire was a fraction of its former self – most of the European portion now independent or under authority of the Austro-Hungarians, central Asia either to Russia or Persia, much of the Middle East and North Africa under control of primarily either the British or Italians, the French are in there somewhere.  Meanwhile, some factions of the Armenian minorities in what remained of Ottoman-controlled lands were agitating for more control, looking to European powers to aid in the quest for independence.

In other words, things weren’t going well for any Ottoman concerned with hanging on to any portion of past glories.  It is worth keeping in mind while considering subsequent events: the Armenians were seen by the Turks as an existential threat to what little remained of the Ottoman state – a meaningless “threat” unless one views the state as a god. 

And then, the Great War as practiced in the Near East:

By the spring of 1915, the Ottomans faced invasion on three fronts.  Since their conquest of the Basra region of southern Iraq in the final months of 1914, Anglo-Indian troops had poised a grave threat at the southern gates of the Ottoman Empire.  In the east, the Ottoman Third Army was in total disarray in the aftermath of Enver Pasha’s ill-conceived Sarakamiş campaign against the Russians in December 1914 and January 1915.  To the west, British and French fleets had mounted sustained attacks against the Dardanelles, and Allied infantry had managed to secure several beachheads on both sides of the straits.

What remained of the empire was under threat:

There were good grounds for the panic that swept the imperial capital in March 1915.  The empire’s collapse appeared eminent.

The Armenians were located primarily in what today is eastern Turkey (“Western Armenia” to some Armenians; a loaded term for Turks) – right on the lines of the failed battles with the Russians.  There were also Armenians in Russia (“Eastern Armenia” to some Armenians).  Armenians from Russia fought against the Turks, and some portion of Armenians from eastern Turkey joined their further-eastern brethren, or at least supported them.

The divided loyalties of some Armenians had turned all Armenians in the eyes of many Turks.  The Young Turk leadership began to contemplate permanent solutions to the “Armenian problem.”

…when, in the spring of 1915, the Young Turks declared the entire Ottoman Armenian population a dangerous fifth column, the Unionists even mobilized average citizens to assist in their annihilation.