Contra Lewy: The Armenian Genocide

In 1996, Gregory H. Stanton, a law professor, former Fulbright scholar, and employee of the United States Department of State, presented a briefing paper in which he promulgated his theory of genocide, which encompassed eight stages. Regarding the eighth stage, Stanton wrote that “every genocide is followed by denial,” and its characteristics range from getting rid of evidence to blaming the victims for their treatment. “They [the perpetrators] block investigations of the crimes,” Stanton continued, “and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile.”[1]

Certainly the behavior of the Ottoman government following the 1915-1916 genocide of Anatolian Armenians fits this bill. However, the denial stage of the Armenian genocide has persisted for a hundred years, with steadfast refusal to accept responsibility by governments of the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey. Moreover, an ongoing public relations campaign of denial by the Turkish government has swayed no small number of Anglo-American scholars. Among these scholars is Guenter Lewy, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In addition to a book on the topic published in 2005,[2] Lewy sought a wider audience by publishing an essay the same year in the neoconservative publication Commentary.[3] Although Lewy seems to make a compelling argument that the case of the Ottoman Armenians was not genocide, he relies on insinuations of disloyalty and selective or incomplete readings of primary sources to make his points.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the definition of genocide has been heavily debated. For his own part, Lewy appeals directly to Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe and contributed to the 1948 Convention on Genocide promulgated by the United Nations.[4] This convention is notable, particularly to Lewy, for its emphasis on "acts committed with intent."[5] Lewy's explicit claim is that the violence committed against Armenians in 1915-1916 does not constitute genocide due to a lack of intent or, to use Lewy's word, "premeditation," which forms as he says the "crucial problem to be addressed."[6]

Lewy begins his argument by outlining the history of the Armenian Revolution Federation (ARF), known in Armenian as the Dashnaks, to establish that violence against Armenians was committed within the context of anti-insurgency. After briefly summarizing Dashnak violence against Ottoman targets beginning with the party's founding in 1890, Lewy states that the Dashnaks resumed guerrilla warfare against the Ottomans with the onset of World War I, in which the Ottomans were matched against Russia, whom Lewy calls "the Armenians' traditional ally."[7] Citing a report to Washington of Henry Morgenthau, Sr., then the U.S. ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Lewy claims that no fewer than 10,000 guerrillas were active by April 1915, but perhaps more than twice that number.[8]

In a mere paragraph, Lewy misrepresents the history substantially. First, while Lewy suggests that Dashnak militancy against the Ottomans began with the start of the war, the record is somewhat different and the number of omissions alarming. In one of his books on the Armenian genocide, Taner Akçam (Clark University, Mass.), who has undertaken among the most thorough investigations of Ottoman documents to date, concludes on the basis of these documents "that the events in question do not in fact constitute an organized rebellion, and […] that there was no popular involvement"; in fact, Akçam demonstrates, the Dashnak leadership itself dissociated itself from the violence and offered its assistance to Ottoman authorities.[9]

Second, Lewy fails to mention the extreme violence meted out by the Ottoman government against Armenian civilians in the so-called Hamidian massacres in 1894-1896, in which hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenians were killed by government forces. In discussing the violence in 1915, Donald Bloxham (Univ. of Edinburgh) notes, "If not all forms of resistance were at the time responses to genocide, most were based on past experience, including of discrimination and massacres."[10] Arum Arkun, executive director of the Tekeyan Cultural Center (N.J.), concurs with regard to the Armenian resistance in Cilicia and Zeitoun, on the Mediterranean, to which Lewy himself refers.[11] Arkun writes, "Any clashes that occurred were interpreted by both sides in light of their fears: for the Muslims, that the Armenians were ready to rebel and collaborate with Allied states potentially interested in occupying Ottoman territory; and for the Armenians, that the Muslims were planning another massacre."[12] Past behavior of Ottoman authorities played an important role in the actions of those Armenians who did rise up.

Finally, Lewy makes only oblique reference to the transnational nature of the ARF; he refers to Dashnak organizations in Sofia, Bulgaria, the Balkans, and the Caucasus, but he never explicitly acknowledges that these party organizations operated separately from each other. For instance, Lewy notes that the Armenian guerrilla Andranik Ozanian meeting with the Russian General Aleksandr Mishlayevsky in 1914,[13] but fails to mention that the Ottoman Anatolian-born Ozanian had left Ottoman territory ten years earlier and moreover had left the ARF in 1908.

Most disconcerting, however, is Lewy's treatment of the aforementioned Morgenthau message to Washington. The actual message, a telegram sent on May 25, 1915, to U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing and classified as confidential, has been widely cited by defenders of the Ottomans in the same manner as Lewy does here. However, the presentation by Lewy is again incomplete. Before addressing the matter of Armenian guerrillas, Morgenthau writes, "The sharp oscillations in the treatment to which it [the Armenian community] has been subjected since the Turkish Revolution [i.e., the Young Turk revolution in 1908] have taken a markedly unfavorable turn by reason on the War."[14]

Morgenthau acknowledges that many Armenians likely compare their lot in the Ottoman Empire with the comparatively better lot of their people in Russia; given the recent memory of the Adana massacre in 1909, in which anti-Young Turk loyalists to the deposed monarch massacred thousands of Armenians, he comments that it would not be surprising if many Armenians and Turks both were suspicious of the government. He further states that the Armenians are no more willing or able to "give expression to their wishes."[15] Then, he notes that some Armenian attempts at desertion from the Ottoman military have been met with "savage repression" and that "entire villages have been destroyed, with the invariable accompaniments of murder, rape and pillage. A more systematic policy than has been customary in the past, appears to have been pursued, in the wholesale deportation of the population.[16] Morgenthau subsequently recounts the refusal of Red Cross aid for Armenian refugees by Turkish authorities.[17]

Only then does Morgenthau mention an Armenian insurgency. It is worth quoting the passage at some length:

In the Eastern regions of the Empire, although news is extremely scarce and unreliable, it would seem as if an Armenian insurrection to help the Russian had broken out in Van. Thus a former deputy here, one Pastermadjian who had assisted our proposed railway concessions some years ago, is now supposed to be fighting the Turks with a legion of Armenian volunteers. These insurgents are said to be in possession of a part of Van and to be conducting a guerrilla warfare [sic] in a country where regular military operations are extremely difficult. To what extent they are organized or what success they have gained it is impossible for me to say; their numbers have been various estimated but none puts them at less than ten thousand and twenty-five thousand is probably closer to the truth.[18]

The remainder of the telegram addresses the mutual fears of the Armenians and the government of one another, the unreliability of incoming information, and the disarming of Armenian and Greek soldiers in the military and their assignment to labor battalions. He notes in concluding that loss of life seems "to have been but a few cases."[19]

Clearly, Lewy has included only those parts of the telegram that most serve his purpose of depicting the Armenians as widely involved in a major insurgency. Besides omitting reports reflecting Ottoman violence against Armenians, he also fails to include Morgenthau's clear statements about the unreliability of the information in the telegram, although it is also worth noting that the estimate of the number of Armenian guerrillas under Russian military control at the time is accurate, and Garegin Pastermadjian was indeed one of the leaders, according to his own admission.[20]

Elsewhere in the essay, Lewy deploys writings from Morgenthau to explain that the Turks sought to expel its Armenian population because they "had come to consider the Armenians a fifth column."[21] Again, however, the telegram says more than what Lewy lets on. This second telegram, dated July 10, 1915, begins, "Persecutions of Armenians assuming unprecedented proportions."[22] Moreover, the segment quoted by Lewy is directly followed thus: "Most of the sufferers are innocent and have been loyal to the Ottoman government. Nearly all are old men [and] women."[23] The penultimate sentence of the same paragraph reads, "There seems to be a systematic plan to crush the Armenian race."[24] Lest there be any mistake about the content of Morgenthau's communiqués during this period, a telegram six days later uses the phrase "race extermination" regarding the Ottomans' treatment of the Armenians.[25]

The obverse of the coin of Lewy's argument about sources is, as he writes, "no authentic documentary evidence exists to prove the culpability of the central government of Turkey for the massacre of 1915-16."[26] Here, Lewy pre-emptively attacks The Memoirs of Naim Bey by Aram Andonian, which he declares is "considered a forgery not only by Turkish historians but by practically every western student of Ottoman history."[27] Comparing the case of the Ottoman Armenians to that of the European Jews during World War II, he concludes, "Barring the unlikely discovery of sensational new documents in the Turkish archives, it is safety to say that no similar evidence exists for the tragic events of 1915-16."[28]

Unfortunately for Lewy, Akçam's exploration of the Ottoman archives did just that. In addressing one of the so-called Andonian telegrams, quoted in The Memoirs of Naim Bey, in which the Ottoman Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha defends the deportation of Armenians to ensure the posterity of Turks from perpetual treason, Akçam remarks, "The contents of this telegram are nearly identical to those of Talat [sic] Pasha's directive of 29 August 1915 to all provinces […] The similarities of the telegrams published by Aram Andonian to this and other extant Ottoman documents make a reexamination of the validity of the Andonian telegrams necessary."[29]

Perhaps Lewy's most grotesque gambit is to suggest that the continued presence of Armenians in some districts of the Ottoman Empire until the end of the war is counterevidence of genocidal intent. He writes, "This would be analogous to Hitler's failing to include the Jews of Berlin, Cologne, and Munich in the Final Solution."[30] Beyond the clear problems such a statement encounters with regard to simple logic (e.g., that there were survivors of the attacks on the World Trade Centers on Sept. 11, 2001, does not negate the intention of Al-Qaeda to kill everyone in the buildings) and to the complexities of Nazi deportation, labor, and extermination policy during World War II, the statement ignores the realities of Young Turk social engineering.

In his survey of the rise of the Turkish nation-state, Uğur Ümit Üngör (Utrecht Univ.) argues persuasively that the experience of losing territory, particularly in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, strengthened the ethnic nationalism of the Young Turks; this experience, "especially [in] the eastern provinces, would give birth to unprecedented forms of population politics and social engineering."[31] Mark Levene (Univ. of Warwick) expands on the economic motivations underlying this ethnic/social engineering -- specifically the creation of an ethnic Turkish middle class, remarking, "The physical destruction of Ottoman Armenians throughout Anatolia in this sense represented the intent to remove a communal group perceived to represent a domestic obstacle in the CUP's [Committee of Union and Progress -- the name of the Young Turks' political party] race for modernization."[32]

Most persuasively, Akçam uses Turkish documents to demonstrate that the removal of the Armenians and the genocide thereof was the most radical expression of a policy designed to leave no district under Ottoman control with a non-Turkish population of more than five to ten percent, thereby guaranteeing Turkish ethnic homogeneity throughout the empire.[33] Thus, the mere presence of Armenians in Constantinople or Smyrna, which Lewy states implies no intent of genocide, does nothing to belie this overall goal, provided that the remaining non-Turkish population in these cities was less than ten percent. In fact, given the removal of ethnic Greeks from these areas during the same period, any policy against Armenians was likely to be less thorough, particularly in comparison to eastern Anatolia, where the ethnic heterogeneity was much greater. Lewy ignores these factors in suggesting a lack of intent on this basis.

In conclusion, while to a layperson, Guenter Lewy might seem to make a strong argument that the treatment of Ottoman Armenians in 1915-1916 was not genocide, a more exacting examination of other scholars’ work and of the primary sources that Lewy cites result in the opposite conclusion. Lewy clearly misrepresents through selective quotation the reports of Ambassador Morgenthau, not only with regard to the intent of the Ottomans but also regarding the scale of Armenian insurrection at that time. Lewy is correct in his essay in urging the two sides in this historical debate to find common ground, but doing so requires an honest reckoning with the historical record.

References

Akçam, Taner. The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and

Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2012.

Arkun, Arum. "Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide." In A

Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, edited by Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman M. Naimark, 221-243. New York: Oxford UP, 2011.

Bloxham, Donald. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the

Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.

Levene, Mark. "Creating a Modern 'Zone of Genocide': The Impact of Nation- and State

Formation in Eastern Anatolia, 1878-1923." Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 3 (Winter 1998): 393-433.

Lewy, Guenter. "The First Genocide of the 20th Century?" Commentary, 61, no. 11

(December 2005): 47-52.

Morgenthau, Henry, U.S. Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, to U.S. Secretary of State

Robert Lansing, May 25, 1915. In United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917, edited by Ara Sarafian, 32-34. Princeton, N.J.: Gomidas Institute, 2004.

Morgenthau, Henry, U.S. Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, to U.S. Secretary of State

Robert Lansing, July 10, 1915. In The Armenian Genocide: The Essential Reference Guide, edited by Alan Whitehorn, 293-294. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2015.

Morgenthau, Henry, U.S. Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, to U.S. Secretary of State

Robert Lansing, July 16, 1915. NARA RG 59, 867.4016/76.

Stanton, Gregory H. “The 8 Stages of Genocide” Genocide Watch. Accessed May 1,

2011. http://www.genocidewatch.org/images/8StagesBriefingpaper.pdf

Üngör, Uğur Ümit. The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia,

1913-1950. New York: Oxford UP, 2011.

United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of

Genocide. Human Rights Web. Accessed September 10, 2016. http://www.hrweb.
org/legal/genocide.html

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[1] Gregory H. Stanton, “The 8 Stages of Genocide,” Genocide Watch, accessed May 1, 2011, http://www.genocidewatch.org/images/8StagesBriefingpaper.pdf

[2] Guenter Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005).

[3] Guenter Lewy, "The First Genocide of the 20th Century?" Commentary, 61, no. 11 (December 2005): 47-52.

[4] Ibid, 47.

[5] United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Human Rights Web, accessed September 10, 2016, http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html, Article II.

[6] Lewy, “First,” 48.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Taner Akçam, The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2012), 163-64.

[10] Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (New York: Oxford UP, 2005), 91.

[11] Lewy, “First,” 48.

[12] Arum Arkun, "Zeytun and the Commencement of the Armenian Genocide," in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, edited by Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman M. Naimark (New York: Oxford UP, 2011), 270.

[13] Lewy, “First,” 49.

[14] Henry Morgenthau, U.S. Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, to U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing, May 25, 1915, in United States Official Records on the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1917, edited by Ara Sarafian (Princeton, N.J.: Gomidas Institute, 2004), 32.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid, 32-33.

[17] Ibid, 33.

[18] Ibid, emphasis mine.

[19] Ibid, 33-34.

[20] Armen Garo and Aram Torossian, Why Armenia Should Be Free: Armenia’s Rôle in the Present War (Boston: Hairenik Publishing, 1918).

[21] Lewy, “First,” 49.

[22] Henry Morgenthau, U.S. Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, to U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing, July 10, 2015, in The Armenian Genocide: The Essential Reference Guide, edited by Alan Whitehorn (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2015), 293-94.

[23] Ibid, bracketed material inserted by Whitehorn.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Henry Morgenthau, U.S. Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, to U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing, July 16, 1915, NARA RG 59, 867.4016/76.

[26] Lewy, “First,” 50.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Akçam, 254 note 90.

[30] Lewy, “First,” 51.

[31] Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950 (New York: Oxford UP, 2011), 50.

[32] Mark Levene, "Creating a Modern 'Zone of Genocide': The Impact of Nation- and State-Formation in Eastern Anatolia, 1878-1923," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no. 3 (Winter 1998): 407

[33] Akçam, 29-62.