THE MIDDLE EAST FRONT   

THE CAUCASUS CAMPAIGN

THE “ARMENIAN GENOCIDE”: 1915-1916

Acknowledgements

Map of Eastern Anatolia: wikiwand.com Young Turks: (detail) amazon.co.uk Photographs re. Deportation (4): by Armin T. Wegner, a young German officer medic working in the Ottoman Empire at this time. Wegner Foundation. Newspaper cutting: en.wikipedia.org. Enver Pasha: geni.com Wegner: en-wikiipedia.org. 1916, photographer unknown.

    The mountainous area south of the Caucasus Mountains was the historic homeland of the Armenians. In 301 they became the first effective Christian state – being converted to Christianity by the religious leader Gregory the Illuminator – and for many years thereafter they enjoyed long periods of autonomy and local prominence. By the 12th century, however, they had became a pawn in the struggle between warring neighbours and vying empires. In 1639 came division. The Ottoman Turks and the Persians, having fought over the area for some time, divided Armenia between them, and then in 1828 the Persians ceded their half to the Russians. This map, dated around 1900, shows the Armenian Provinces, the Russian Provinces, and the two areas where there were significant Armenian populations.

    Given time, the Turkish Muslems came to see the Armenians – a large and growing Christian population over much of eastern Anatolia – as a possible, if not a likely threat, to the stability of the state. Indeed, for this reason, this people (like other non-Turkish and non Muslem subjects) had long suffered from discrimination and, at times, savage persecution. They were regarded as second-class citizens; denied normal safeguards; obliged, as non-Muslems, to pay discriminatory taxes; and they could take no part in politics. Now worse was to come. During the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid, a large-scale massacre of Armenians was carried out over the years 1894 to 1896 (one estimate put at 300,000), despite criticism from a number of world powers. Then, in 1908, the Young Turks came to power, a group advocating the need for the supremacy of the Turkish Muslem people wherever they might be. Not only were all Ottomans to be seen as equal, but they were also to be seen as united. This would bring about the birth of Ottoman hegemony across the steppes of Central Asia, and establish a Turkish state which would stretch from the Balkans to China. Paramount amongst those peoples who stood in the way of this ambitious concept were the Armenians. They were Christian by faith and not of Turkish blood. There was no room for conciliation. Steps had to be taken. As a resut, the Massacre of Adana took place in 1909 – regarded by some as the opening of the Armenian Genocide – but it was the Caucasus Campaign, beginning in 1914, that brought matters to a positive head. War, in fact, with all its ills, offered a ready solution.

     As we have seen, following the Battle of Sarikamish, the Turkish leader, Enver Pasha, was quick to put the blame for this disastrous defeat on the Armenians. They were to be the scapegoats. In fact, however, there was a measure of justification for such reasoning. Many Armenians, it must be said, fought with fortitude and valour within the Turkish army, but, by the same token, many had deserted from the army or failed to join in the first place. And large numbers had crossed the border to support the Russians, their fellow Christians of the Greek Orthodox Church. And even more alarming was the formation of Armenian guerrilla bands operating within Anatolia. Their attacks and the reprisals they created led to an all-out, vicious conflict in the city of Van early in 1915. There, both sides accused the other of atrocities against civilians as well as fighting men. In the meantime the Turkish government set up small units, manned by released convicts, tasked with destroying Armenian villages and their inhabitants along the border with Russia. The Christian, non-Turkish Armenians were proving a threat to the nation.

     By the Massacre of Adana in April 1909 (taking the lives of some 20,000 Armenians), the Young Turks had made a start in dealing with the “Armenian Question”. Now they came up with the “final resolution”. They had begun this remedy in April 1915 by rounding up and executing, without trial, hundreds of Armenian intellectuals. Now they began disarming and executing all conscripts, and deporting the mass of the Armenian people – women, children and the elderly - to reallocation centres in the Syrian Desert. From there they were to be sent to settle in less vulnerable areas of the empire. In fact, the vast majority of them never completed these “death marches”. Many were brutally murdered en route by Turkish soldiers or Kurdish nomads, but the majority it would seem died of starvation; were overcome by the heat of the desert; or succumbed to the savage treatment metered out to them during the forced marches. Survivors’ accounts report many incidents of rape, beatings and torture, and some of these have been independently confirmed. And there were cases where children and young women were abducted and forced to convert to Islam. The “resettlement” took some years to complete. It is estimated that by 1922 between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians (that is some 80% of their population) had perished by one means or another. Several hundred thousand did manage to find refuge in neighbouring countries or, with assistance, start a new life further afield (notably in the United States and Russia) but, in comparison, they were few in number. Andxa large number of lives were saved by the efforts of the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau. Moved by what he saw as “the greatest crime of the ages”, he got the plight of the Armenians published in the American press, and helped to set up Near East Relief, a public fund, which sent food to “the starving Armenians” and, after the war, assisted many who were left homeless.

    To the Armenians and many foreign observers the policy of deportation was a deliberate policy of genocide, a crime against humanity, specifically organised by the Ottoman government. Countries around the world, including Canada, Russia, France and the United States, have shared this view, and as late as 2016 the Bundestag officially apologised for Germany’s “inglorious role” in this sad event. For their part, the Turks, on behalf of the Ottoman Empire, have continuously and vigorously denied the charge of genocide. The Armenian population of Anatola, they argue, was a decided threat to national security and the Ottomans, in time of war, had no alternative but to introduce a policy of deportation. Whilst in no way denying the losses suffered by the Armenians, they insist that these were caused by the outbreaks of typhus and cholera, plus exposure to the elements due to the lack of transport, food and shelter. The Ottoman provincial authorities, given wartime restrictions, had been unable to cope with the demands made upon them. Thus the terrible events of 1915 to 1916 – by which time almost the entire Armenian population of Anatolian Tukey had virtually disappeared – remains a highly sensitive issue. It is estimated by some that between 800,000 and 1,800,000 Armenians died, 300,000 Assyrians, and 750,000 Greeks. The Armenian Question, or whatever one might call it, was the greatest atrocity of the First World War. At the time, it was seen as an event that would never be surpassed in its scope and cruelty. Sadly, that was not the case. It was well and truly surpassed in the Second World War with the Nazi persecution of the Jews via what they called their “final solution”.

     Incidentally, there is some clear evidence that the Turks did carry out the deliberate murder of many of their Armenian citizens. Halil Pasha, the Turkish commander who, as we shall see, was to play so prominent a part in in the Mesopotamian Campaign – besieging a large Anglo-Indian force at Kut and forcing its surrender – was deeply involved in the Armenian Genocide. An uncle of Enver Pasha, he openly admitted that he had personally organised the killing, by various means, of some 300,000 men, women and children.

     EnverxPasha (1881-1922) was born in Constantinople and, graduating from staff college in 1902, made rapid progress through the ranks. A revolutionary by nature, he became a prominent member of the Young Turk movement in 1908 – aimed at establishing a constitutional form of government – and in 1913, following the assassination of the Grand Vizier, was appointed one of “Three Pashas”, a triumvirate that governed the Ottoman Empire throughout the war. As both war minister and commander in chief, he virtually conducted government policy. Having served as a military attache in Berlin and come to admire German military prowess, he employed a large number of German commanders to revitalize the Turkish army. Then, in the October, convinced that the Central Powers would win the war, he entered the conflict alongside the German Empire – declaring war on the Allies by a surprise bombardment of Russian Black Sea ports. But this declaration opened up the Caucasus Campaign and here, his failure as a commander in the field culminated in the disastrous Battle of Sarikamish. It was then – based on his gung-ho ambition to create a Pan-Turkic empire stretching from the Balkans to China – that he embarked upon the so-called Armenian Massacre, a horrifying event by which he sought “Islamic unity”, the physical elimination of all Christian minorities. At the end of the war, having capitulated by signing the Armistice of Mudros, he managed to escape but, in his absence, a Military Tribunal sentenced him to death for plunging the Ottoman Empire into the war, and for the forced deportation of Armenians. Enver Pasha ended up in Central Asia where, in August 1922, still fighting his cause, he was killed leading a revolt against Russian imperialism.

    Incidentally, thexyoung German officer and medic who took the photographs shown above, Armin T. Wegner (1886-1978), was deeply moved by the suffering he witnessed. In 1919 he wrote an open letter to the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, calling for an independent Armenian State. Then in April 1933 he was brave enough to write a letter to the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, criticising his party’s treatment of the Jews. He was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. When eventually released in 1934, he emigrated to Italy and spent the rest of his life there. ……

     …… ThexAustrian-Bohemian novelist and playwright Franz Werfel (1890-1945) is known for his work The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. Published in 1933 following a visit to the Middle East, it gives a graphic account of the mass murder and expulsion of the Armenians from eastern Anatolia. He is best remembered today, however, for his Song of Bernadette, published in 1941 and made into a very successful film. ……

     …… The Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) was born in Anatolia. In 1908, after his father left the country in order to escape army service, he lived with his mother and three sisters in Van but, in 1914 they managed to escape to Russian-held territory. He spent most of his life in the United States, and was a major influence in the development of Abstract Expressionism.

    As we shall see, when, in January 1916, the Russians launched another attack in their Caucasus Campaign – their second attempt to take the fortress of Erzurum – they were among the first to witness the misery and the desolation caused throughout Armenia by the Ottoman government’s policy of “deportation” or “resettlement”, a policy regarded by some as nothing short of “ethnic cleansing”.

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