The rise of Hindutva - Hindu nationalism - in India has led to periodic violence against Indian Christians. There is evidence in many cases of a systematic policy (or compliance at the very least) in place by the BJP and allied parties.
Also, the U.S. administration denied a visa to Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist and chief minister of the Gujarat state in western India. The basis for the denial was the violence perpetrated against the minority Moslem population, particularly in 2002. Read more here.
18 March 2005
U.S. seeks pacts on religious freedom
The Bush administration said yesterday it is close to reaching agreements with Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Eritrea that would improve the state of religious freedom in the three countries of "particular concern" for Washington. Read more about this development here.
Religious Liberty has been an area of particular concern for the past two administrations, primarily represented through the United States Commission for Religious Liberty.
Religious Liberty has been an area of particular concern for the past two administrations, primarily represented through the United States Commission for Religious Liberty.
16 March 2005
Turkey's Compliance with its Obligations to the Ecumencial Patriarchate and Orthodox Christian Minority
A century ago, there were millions of Orthodox Christians yet present in Asia Minor, including the Greek Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodx Armenians, Syriacs, and Assyrians. Between the periodic pogroms culminating in the Genocide of the First World War years and the exchange of populations from 1923, the population in Turkey was much reduced. Anti-Greek riots (occurring whilst the authorities stood aside) in the 1950s in Istanbul increased immigration, so that by 2004 there were only about 1500 Greek Orthodox Christians left in the city. The Oriental Orthodox presence is negligable, as well, with possibly more ancient, crumbling churches spread around the country than actual, living Armenians.
The Fourth Ecumencial Council met at Chalcedon in Anno Domini 451. Canon XXVIII confirmed Constantinople (now Istanbul) as the second Apostolic city only after Rome, and ahead of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Yet today the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, in the Phanar, is greatly weakened, in many ways due to the oppressive nature of the Turkish government. Although officially secularist, many (especially under the current Islamic-oriented government) view Christians as second-class citizens. At a hotel in Goreme, Cappadocia, we were told by the Turkish manager that no one was there before the Turks came, nevermind that we were staying in millenium-old converted monastic cells (a great place of pilgrimage, and a lot of fun, too). Here is a recent White Paper on the conduct of the Turkish government towards its Christian minority, from Yale University. More news on the situation can be found here.
The Fourth Ecumencial Council met at Chalcedon in Anno Domini 451. Canon XXVIII confirmed Constantinople (now Istanbul) as the second Apostolic city only after Rome, and ahead of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Yet today the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, in the Phanar, is greatly weakened, in many ways due to the oppressive nature of the Turkish government. Although officially secularist, many (especially under the current Islamic-oriented government) view Christians as second-class citizens. At a hotel in Goreme, Cappadocia, we were told by the Turkish manager that no one was there before the Turks came, nevermind that we were staying in millenium-old converted monastic cells (a great place of pilgrimage, and a lot of fun, too). Here is a recent White Paper on the conduct of the Turkish government towards its Christian minority, from Yale University. More news on the situation can be found here.
Protocol No. 229
† B A R T H O L O M E W
BY THE MERCY OF GOD ARCHBISHOP OF CONSTANTINOPLE,
NEW ROME, AND ECUMENICAL PATRIARCH,
TO THE PLENITUDE OF THE CHURCH, GRACE AND
PEACE FROM OUR SAVIOR CHRIST, TOGETHER WITH
OUR PRAYER, BLESSING AND FORGIVENESS
Read the Catechetical homily on the occasion of Holy and Great Lent...
† B A R T H O L O M E W
BY THE MERCY OF GOD ARCHBISHOP OF CONSTANTINOPLE,
NEW ROME, AND ECUMENICAL PATRIARCH,
TO THE PLENITUDE OF THE CHURCH, GRACE AND
PEACE FROM OUR SAVIOR CHRIST, TOGETHER WITH
OUR PRAYER, BLESSING AND FORGIVENESS
Read the Catechetical homily on the occasion of Holy and Great Lent...
14 March 2005
Prayer of Saint Ephrem
O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, meddling, lust of power, and idle talk.
But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to thy servant.
Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own sins and not to judge my brother, for thou art blessed unto ages of ages. Amen.
O God, be gracious to me, a sinner.
O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, meddling, lust of power, and idle talk.
But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to thy servant.
Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own sins and not to judge my brother, for thou art blessed unto ages of ages. Amen.
O God, be gracious to me, a sinner.
The Great Fast is upon us!
Great Lent: Our Journey To Meet Our Heavenly Bridegroom
by Saint John Chrysostom
Excerpts about fasting from the teachings of St. John Chrysostom, may his prayers be with us, Amen.
by Saint John Chrysostom
Excerpts about fasting from the teachings of St. John Chrysostom, may his prayers be with us, Amen.
04 March 2005
Hindutva Continues
Hindu nationalism continues in many parts of India, usually looked upon benignly by the authorities. Although the world is only too familiar with the conflicts between Hindus and Moslems in Kashmir and other areas particularly in the west of India, the violence directed against India's Christian minority is seldom reported. Read also about the BJP's attempt to force through an anti-conversion law.
02 February 2005
Iraqi Christians Disenfranchised
Although the world body is well aware of the Hussein regime's oppression of the Kurdish minority in the north of Iraq, few indeed are the reports in the media to be found about the persecuted Christian minorities. In particular, the Assyrian Christians - resident in Iraq for millenia - have been victims of the Kurdish campaign in the north for an ethnic homeland, Kurdistan. Besides numerous accounts of violence, Assyrians were disenfranchised in the recent election. Polling stations packed with willing voters never received their designated ballots -- because the Kurdish authorites kept them locked away.
15 January 2005
The Armenian Genocide & the De-Christianization of Turkey
Here is a paper that I wrote in the Spring of 2004 on the Armenian Genocide.
Scott Parker
27 April 2004
The legacy of the Armenian Genocide of A.D. 1915-1923 echoes loudly down the oft forgetful halls of history. Although seemingly a relatively minor factor in modern global politics, its lingering effects sound loudly for such a small, if ancient, people. Consider, for example, the fact that modern Armenia still has a sealed border with Turkey, its largest neighbor, despite the fact that the country has been in a desperate state for over a decade. The issue preventing diplomatic relations is that Turkey refuses to acknowledge the genocide. Ask nearly any Armenian in America about this issue and you will surely get an earful. The Turks, on the other hand, maintain that some Armenians died, but only in the midst of massive turmoil and upheaval in which many others died as well. As recently as A.D. 2000, the American Congress shelved a proposal acknowledging the Armenian Genocide at the last moment (due to political pressure), whereas the French Assembly did pass a motion, resulting in the loss of millions of dollars worth of contracts in Turkey, as well as creating diplomatic strife. The central criticism of Turkey is that it will not allow a thorough investigation of this matter, but rather simply denies it without allowing access. Was there truly a historical Armenian Genocide? What were its immediate effects and what are the results eighty years later? Examining the available evidence, I hope to place these questions in their proper context and suggest a proper American response.
This topic of the Armenian Genocide is most appropriate, as 24 April was a day set aside to commemorate the up to 1.5 million Armenian deaths in the Ottoman Empire from 1915-1923 (not to mention ANZAC Day). Yet it was not only Armenian Christians who were persecuted, but also Assyrian, Chaldean, Greek, Jacobite, Maronite, and other Christians. Some of these (especially the Greeks and Assyrians, or Nestorians) were and are located in the territory of present-day Turkey, but I shall focus primarily on the Armenian issue. David Barrett lists 3,091,530 Christians in Turkey in 1900, but following the repeated massacres and deportations of the ancient Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian populations, the figure he designates for year 2000 is only 388,757, or six-tenths of one percent of the total population as compared to 21.8 percent a century prior.
Historical Narrative to the Eve of the Great War
Turkey – or, for our purposes, also known as Anatolia or Asia Minor – contains many of the primary locations mentioned in the New Testament. The Apostle Paul journeyed here on his missionary journeys, and ancient tradition maintains St. John the Divine and the Virgin Mary lived their latter days at Ephesus, while the Apostle Andrew evangelized Byzantium. Tradition also claims the Apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew as evangelizing Armenia in the First Century A.D., and before Byzantium became Constantinople, Armenia became the first officially Christian nation in A.D. 301, thus celebrating their seventeen-hundredth anniversary in 2001.
Lying along the frontiers of the great empires – Roman, Parthian, Persian, Byzantine, and later the Moslem powers – it should not come as a surprise that Armenia suffered great challenges, including years as a vassal state. Armenians first began immigrating in large numbers to Cilicia in the eleventh century, corresponding to the overrunning of Armenia Major in 1064 by the Seljuk Turks under Alp Arslan. This became a flood following the disaster at Manzikert in 1071, and before long the area was known as Lesser Armenia. This kingdom survived more or less independent until 1375, yet one feature that was consistent whether as an independent or vassal state was the sense of distinct religious identity. “That from time to time they were able to sample an independence which was related to and expressed through their faith further attached them to that faith when independence was lost or threatened.” In 1441, the Armenian Catholicos returned to his church’s origins at Echmiadzin in the Armenian heartland – the original residence of the Armenian patriarch since the time of Gregory the Illuminator.
Armenians viewed themselves as Europeans and had sought help from the West (via the Papacy) as early as the Crusader period. Some acknowledged the primacy of the Roman bishop in hopes of receiving aid. Missionaries – particularly Americans – became settled in Smyrna and Constantinople by 1831. Their focus, as elsewhere around the globe, was to win converts through civilizing efforts, particularly through education. When their efforts were rebuffed by the Moslem Turks, they focused on the Christian minorities. They did win some converts to Protestantism, and in their education and literacy efforts “conveyed the democratic ideas of human liberty and individualism embodied by Protestantism” to an even larger segment of the Armenian population. These ideals of freedom of expression and justice against oppression fostered resistance to Ottoman authority and instilled pride in Armenian cultural values. Meanwhile, in the later eighteenth century, the “Sick Old Man of Europe” under Abdul Hamid sought to revitalize its prospects through a policy of Pan-Islamism. The victims of such a policy were, naturally, the Christian minorities of his empire, and for the welfare of these did the European Powers (though not so much the Kaiser) seek to intervene. The Sultan was uncooperative, however, and the effect of such European interest was that Abdul Hamid came to view the two-and-a-half million Armenians in his empire with “obsessive fear and malevolence.” The Ottoman government followed a policy of harassment and extortion, and where the officials were less of a presence, the hostile Kurdish tribes more than made up for it.
With the ineffectiveness of the Western Powers all too evident, young Armenians in Turkey began to organize themselves into political parties (from 1885) with slogans such as “Liberty or Death!” Unfortunately, they were not in a nation where such efforts were tolerated, especially being second-class dhimmis in the eyes of the Muslim authorities. The Ottoman response was to organize, beginning in 1891, irregular cavalry regiments of Kurdish tribesmen with the official task of suppressing the Armenians; by 1892 they numbered fifteen thousand and were growing. In 1893, Armenian revolutionaries sought to stir up a Moslem revolt, but the end result was a welcome pretext for the Sultan to issue orders to massacre Armenian communities. Further displays of nationalism were met by the sword, and this extended even to those areas unaffected by Armenian nationalism. This aggression continued at least through 1896, culminating in up to two hundred and fifty thousand dead, with massacres from Trebizond, to Urfa (ancient Edessa, in which one-third of the population was Armenian), and to Istanbul itself, which finally gained the attention of the foreign embassies. The European Powers convened conferences, threatened action, and issued demands, but “once again disunity and indecision among the European powers gave the dwindling Ottoman Empire a further brief lease of life.” Beyond ineffectual verbage, in other words, nothing was done to help the doomed Armenians beyond appeasement. The rise of the Young Turks faction in the Ottoman government did not alter the Armenian policy, as another fifteen to twenty-five thousand were massacred at Adana in 1909.
These examples of systematic extermination, while certainly not new for Christians in the Ottoman Empire or, indeed, under any Moslem rule, did coincide with a rising American awareness of the greater world and, in effect, a new emphasis on foreign affairs. 1896 witnessed the very first international human rights resolution in American history – the Cullom resolution – condemning the Sultanate for the massacres. It is worth repeating the great potential that the American missionaries played in instilling a sense of nationalism in their Armenian pupils. The same Protestant ethic led to the creation of the National American Relief Committee, which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and even recruited Clara Barton to take her Red Cross teams to the Armenian provinces. The American consciousness was raised, and many of her most influential citizens demanded action of various kinds by the government (consider Theodore Roosevelt – but that should not come as too much of a surprise). This awareness continued through the First World War, significantly by way of relaying information by American missionaries and consulate officials.
Non-Turkish Perspective on the Armenian Genocide
The rise of Armenian nationalism in the nineteenth century led many Turks (especially the government) to be suspicious of them as potential fifth columnists. The outbreak of World War I witnessed the enrollment of many Armenians from the Caucasus into the Russian army with the avowed purpose of “liberating” Turkish Armenia. Though they may have been enticed with false optimism from the Tsar, the advance of the Russian army in the Caucasus and the maneuvering of Armenian revolutionaries (a small minority) gave the Young Turks an excuse to further restrict and oppress Armenians via a combination of massacres, deportations, and enslavement. The Turks were hard pressed at first, but “[t]he British failure at Gallipoli [in 1915] gave a breathing space to the Young Turk triumvirate, leaving it free to pursue, without external interference, a premeditated internal policy for the final elimination of the Armenian race.” The pretext was the proximity of many of them to the Russian front; many hundreds of thousands were massacred, and many of the rest died whilst being marched into deportation. The Ottomans trained and relied upon Turkish and Kurdish tribesman to harass the remaining Armenians across Turkey, looting and killing as they went along.
Christian males over the age of twelve were killed, and the others forcibly marched into the desert between Syria and Iraq; those who survived the deportation were mostly either enslaved or killed. Ye’or argues that this genocide contains all the elements inherent in a jihad against a Dhimmi people: deportation, enslavement, forced conversion, and massacre. As mentioned earlier, other Christian communities also suffered drastically, including the Jacobites and Assyrians. This attempted extermination of the Armenians is quite similar to the earlier attempts in the Balkans (with the rising nationalism of the earlier nineteenth century), with the exception being that the European groups were on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire and could thus more effectively appeal to and play the European Powers off of each other. The Armenians of Lesser Armenia and Cilicia, however, never reached a majority within Ottoman lands and the only power that they could truly appeal to was Russia; Tsarist rule of Anatolia, however, was imminently opposed by the other European Powers. Also, most of these European nations also ruled over large Moslem populations in their overseas domains, and thus sought to minimize the political effects of the Genocide, lest they stir up the populations further against their colonial forces.
[Click here for a detailed map of the affected areas.]
Turkish Perspectives on the “Armenian Genocide”
Henry Morgenthau, American Ambassador to Turkey, recorded a conversation in 1915 with Enver Pasha (one of the leaders of the Young Turk government) on the official position regarding the Turkish Armenian policy:
…We are now fighting for our lives at the Dardanelles and…we are sacrificing thousands of men. While we are engaged in such a struggle as this, we cannot permit people in our own country to attack us in the back…Russia, France, Great Britain, and America are doing the Armenians no kindness by sympathizing with and encouraging them…I am sure that if these outside countries did not encourage them, they would give up all their efforts to oppose the present government and become law-abiding citizens.
This line of reasoning is certainly logical enough, and consistent with much of Ottoman rhetoric.
The Russian army invaded Ottoman territory in November of 1914, eventually causing their opposing army to scatter and flee. Russian policy was to evacuate the willing Armenian population from their territory before advancing their army. The Ottomans soon did the same thing, however, yet with a different rationale, for it was impossible to determine which Armenians were loyal or innocent, and which were supporters of the Russian invader. Thus the Armenian inhabitants of Van, Bitlis, and Erzurum were completely evacuated to areas in northern Iraq and central Syria where they would not be a potential threat to Ottoman military operations. Shaw maintains that the evidence supports the government’s attempted protection of the Armenian refugee columns, despite tribal attacks, and of its overall good faith. He also uses figures from the Ottoman census showing an Armenian population of only 1,300,000, with about 200,000 dying from the deportation and other effects of war (alongside two million Moslems also dead). Indeed, Turkish apologists often refer to the Christian massacres as but a small part of the overall massive loss of life of all Anatolians, and this mostly at the hands of Kurdish militants.
The city of Van in the east came the closest of any Anatolian city of having an Armenian majority. With incitement by Armenian revolutionaries and Russian promises of military intervention, the Muslim population was expelled and many likewise massacred. Russian military assistance did indeed come and the Armenian population swelled. However, the Turks soon drove the Russians out and many tens of thousands of Armenians fled.
Attaturk’s new nationalist government sought to distance itself from the violent excesses of its Ottoman and Young Turk predecessors, but nonetheless did little enough to help religious and ethnic minorities and confiscated all Armenian property in 1931. Mustafa Kemal Attaturk himself stated: “These left-overs from the former Young Turk Party, who should have been made to account for the millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse, from their homes and massacred, have been restive under the Republican rule.” Such a blunt statement runs counter to allegations of Turkish governments both before and after that of the Father of the Turkish nation. Turkish officials tend to put the number of Armenian dead about 300,000, whereas Armenians claim 1.5 million dead. Howard suggests about one million, along with 300,000 Anatolian Greeks massacred. Either way, the ancient face of Anatolia was changed forever, with more to come.
The Distribution of the Armenian Population in Caucasia, 1914
The Distribution of the Armenian Population in Caucasia, 1926
Armistice did not mean the end of violence in Turkey, for she still had a long ways to go. Invasion by a Greek army and eventual Turkish civil war were only some of the many problems faced by Attaturk, the “Hero of Gallipoli.” Eventually, he smashed the Greeks and secured the borders of the Turkish state. The problem with being friendly towards an invading force is what to do when they are defeated and forced out. The Armenians and Greeks learned this to their great dismay, to say the least. Attaturk found himself in a very secure position and agreed in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne to an exchange of populations with Greece: around a million Greeks were forcibly exiled from Anatolia to Greece in return for about three hundred and fifty thousand Turkish Moslems from Greece. Only about sixty-five thousand Armenians and about one hundred and twenty thousand Greeks remained; Christians whose ancestors had resided in Anatolia for centuries and even millennia had numbered over twenty percent before the wars, but were now down to less than one percent.
Aftermath and Conclusion
When Hitler sent his death squads into Poland in 1939 with orders to kill any and all of the Polish race, he justified to his generals: “Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?” This is what a policy of appeasement and unjust self-interest results in. As if the Greek position was not bad enough after the massacres and exchange of populations through 1925, Greek Cypriot nationalism provided enough of an impetus for “the worst race riot in Europe since Kristallnacht” against Istanbul’s Christian population in September 1955. Turkish authorities did little to intervene, and sixty of the eighty remaining Orthodox churches in Istanbul were sacked or gutted. In 1923, there were about 400,000 Greek Christians in Istanbul, whereas this population has shrunk to a mere few thousand today. The Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople recorded over 2,500 ecclesiastical buildings in 1914; by 1974, there were only 913 buildings whose locations were still known, and of these 464 had completely disappeared, 252 were in ruins, and only 197 were usable.
The Turkish authorities continue to insist that there was no systematic extermination of the Armenian or any other Christian population. Western governments, however, are not convinced. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Hoover, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush have all paid tribute to the victims of the Armenian Genocide, and at least fourteen nations have formally acknowledged the historical tragedy of the Genocide. The European Parliament passed a resolution in 1987 recognizing Turkey’s refusal to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide as “an insurmountable obstacle” in its quest to join the European Community (predecessor of the European Union). The U.S. Congress deliberated passing a measure in 2000 recognizing the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, but was convinced in the end by President Clinton that a formal measure was ultimately not in anyone’s interests. France, however, did affirm the Genocide, and, whilst in the moral right, paid for economically and politically (although short-term). While Turkey is in the extreme minority in its views, Western governments and Armenians themselves are quite willing to dialogue. The central proposal is that if the Turks wish to come clean, then simply open up the government archives to the public. Armenians have a victim mentality, but if all occurred as the Turks insist, then we shall see a much more complex story from the one the Armenians vocalize.
Besides the failure to open up sealed documents, however, the very fact that the Turkish government is still actively persecuting its Christian minorities (not to mention its substantial Kurdish population) makes for a lack of credibility. There are numerous accounts of systematic, deliberate destruction of Armenian churches (often with high explosives) and other cultural relics by government representatives. That there is a noticeable bias in favor of Turkish and Islamic architectural structures is obvious even to the casual tourist in Istanbul: mosques are actively restored and well financed, whereas churches are mostly left to the destructive forces of nature. Hilda Hulya Potuoglu was arrested and convicted in 1986 to between seven and fifteen years in jail for her literary contribution to the Encyclopedia Britannica in which she acknowledged historical Armenian Cilicia; the Britannica joined a growing list of forbidden books. One of the few remaining priests was provocatively asked in 2000 if he believed in the Assyrian Holocaust of 1915. He surprised the reporters (who were trying to influence the U.S. Congressional deliberations on the 1915 Genocide) by affirming it and was subsequently arrested facing treason. In a presentation delivered in 2000, Panayiotis Diamadis shares:
For those who believe deportations and executions of Assyrians are things of a distant past…we saw a video on the villages and monasteries of Tur Abdin in south-east Asia Minor. Village after village was either deserted or had recently become Kurdish. Two villages (one Christian, the other Kurdish) sit side-by-side in the foothills of the mountains where guerrillas of the Workers Party of Kurdistan (PKK) are active, fighting for an independent Kurdish state. On the pretext of this guerrilla activity, the Turkish Army deported the population of the Christian village to another settlement in the valley, further away from the mountains…the Kurdish village was left untouched. This is a familiar story...
As George Hintlian, curator of the Armenian Museum in Jerusalem, laments, “ Soon there will be virtually no evidence that the Armenians were ever in Turkey. We will have become a historical myth.” Turkey has great potential for religious tourism (a fact to which the government is awakening), yet beyond a minor, controlled situation, the policy seems to be that Turkey is for the Turks and they will prove that it has always been thus.
“Across the Middle East, it was above all the bloodshed of 1915 that destroyed ancient Christian cultures that had lasted successfully since Roman times, groups like the Jacobites, Nestorians, and Chaldeans” (and seriously devastated others including Armenians and Maronites). The Near East and Asia Minor are truly the birthplace of Christianity and it can only be sad that the Christian populations are depleting so rapidly – though currently mostly via immigration. Hundreds of thousands (and perhaps even 1.5 million) Armenians did perish in the last throes of the Ottoman Empire, and while the figures may be disputed, in context to their small numbers to begin with, the loss is greatly to be felt. All too often decisions are made with but short foresight, and the children feel the repercussions. Ask the Greek Cypriots in a few years if their decision to reject reunification with the Turkish Cypriots was truly the wise one. They should bow their heads, just as the Turkish government should reach out to the Armenians on their border and seek a new relationship, each repudiating the countless sins of their forebears and working for the future. We must remember, ultimately, that Christianity is not bound to any one geographic location, but by its very nature is transportable and adaptable.
Monastery of Holy Etchmiadzin, spiritual home of the Armenian Church
Bibliography
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Response (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2003).
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University Press, 2001).
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Melling, Dimitri Brady, Sidney H. Griffith, and John F. Healey (Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002).
Dalrymple, William, From the Holy Mountain (New York: Henry Holt & Company,
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Diamadis, Panayiotis, The Assyrians in the Christian Asia Minor Holocaust
(Delivered at the “Assyrians After Assyria: Persecutions and Massacres
of Syriac-speaking Christians” International Conference, University of
Australia, 2 July 2000). Available at: http://www.atour.com/.
Economist, “Turkey and the Armenians: That Controversial G-word” in 1
February 2001. Available at: Http://www.economist.com.
Gillman, Ian and Hans-Joachim Klimkeit, Christians in Asia before 1500 (Ann
Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1999.
Goldschmidt, Jr, Arthur. A Concise History of the Middle East (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1999).
Howard, Douglas A., The History of Turkey (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
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Jenkins, Philip, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
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The Los Angeles Examiner, August 1, 1926. Available at:
Http://www.cilicia.com/armo10a.html.
Turkey Arrests Priest for Refusing to Deny Genocide. Available at:
http://www.mohawkc.on.ca/clubs/assyrian/Turkey-Arrests.html.
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Publishers, 1975?).
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Modern Turkey, Volume II (New York: Cambridge University Press,
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Dhimmitude (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996).
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Scott Parker
27 April 2004
The legacy of the Armenian Genocide of A.D. 1915-1923 echoes loudly down the oft forgetful halls of history. Although seemingly a relatively minor factor in modern global politics, its lingering effects sound loudly for such a small, if ancient, people. Consider, for example, the fact that modern Armenia still has a sealed border with Turkey, its largest neighbor, despite the fact that the country has been in a desperate state for over a decade. The issue preventing diplomatic relations is that Turkey refuses to acknowledge the genocide. Ask nearly any Armenian in America about this issue and you will surely get an earful. The Turks, on the other hand, maintain that some Armenians died, but only in the midst of massive turmoil and upheaval in which many others died as well. As recently as A.D. 2000, the American Congress shelved a proposal acknowledging the Armenian Genocide at the last moment (due to political pressure), whereas the French Assembly did pass a motion, resulting in the loss of millions of dollars worth of contracts in Turkey, as well as creating diplomatic strife. The central criticism of Turkey is that it will not allow a thorough investigation of this matter, but rather simply denies it without allowing access. Was there truly a historical Armenian Genocide? What were its immediate effects and what are the results eighty years later? Examining the available evidence, I hope to place these questions in their proper context and suggest a proper American response.
This topic of the Armenian Genocide is most appropriate, as 24 April was a day set aside to commemorate the up to 1.5 million Armenian deaths in the Ottoman Empire from 1915-1923 (not to mention ANZAC Day). Yet it was not only Armenian Christians who were persecuted, but also Assyrian, Chaldean, Greek, Jacobite, Maronite, and other Christians. Some of these (especially the Greeks and Assyrians, or Nestorians) were and are located in the territory of present-day Turkey, but I shall focus primarily on the Armenian issue. David Barrett lists 3,091,530 Christians in Turkey in 1900, but following the repeated massacres and deportations of the ancient Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian populations, the figure he designates for year 2000 is only 388,757, or six-tenths of one percent of the total population as compared to 21.8 percent a century prior.
Historical Narrative to the Eve of the Great War
Turkey – or, for our purposes, also known as Anatolia or Asia Minor – contains many of the primary locations mentioned in the New Testament. The Apostle Paul journeyed here on his missionary journeys, and ancient tradition maintains St. John the Divine and the Virgin Mary lived their latter days at Ephesus, while the Apostle Andrew evangelized Byzantium. Tradition also claims the Apostles Thaddeus and Bartholomew as evangelizing Armenia in the First Century A.D., and before Byzantium became Constantinople, Armenia became the first officially Christian nation in A.D. 301, thus celebrating their seventeen-hundredth anniversary in 2001.
Lying along the frontiers of the great empires – Roman, Parthian, Persian, Byzantine, and later the Moslem powers – it should not come as a surprise that Armenia suffered great challenges, including years as a vassal state. Armenians first began immigrating in large numbers to Cilicia in the eleventh century, corresponding to the overrunning of Armenia Major in 1064 by the Seljuk Turks under Alp Arslan. This became a flood following the disaster at Manzikert in 1071, and before long the area was known as Lesser Armenia. This kingdom survived more or less independent until 1375, yet one feature that was consistent whether as an independent or vassal state was the sense of distinct religious identity. “That from time to time they were able to sample an independence which was related to and expressed through their faith further attached them to that faith when independence was lost or threatened.” In 1441, the Armenian Catholicos returned to his church’s origins at Echmiadzin in the Armenian heartland – the original residence of the Armenian patriarch since the time of Gregory the Illuminator.
Armenians viewed themselves as Europeans and had sought help from the West (via the Papacy) as early as the Crusader period. Some acknowledged the primacy of the Roman bishop in hopes of receiving aid. Missionaries – particularly Americans – became settled in Smyrna and Constantinople by 1831. Their focus, as elsewhere around the globe, was to win converts through civilizing efforts, particularly through education. When their efforts were rebuffed by the Moslem Turks, they focused on the Christian minorities. They did win some converts to Protestantism, and in their education and literacy efforts “conveyed the democratic ideas of human liberty and individualism embodied by Protestantism” to an even larger segment of the Armenian population. These ideals of freedom of expression and justice against oppression fostered resistance to Ottoman authority and instilled pride in Armenian cultural values. Meanwhile, in the later eighteenth century, the “Sick Old Man of Europe” under Abdul Hamid sought to revitalize its prospects through a policy of Pan-Islamism. The victims of such a policy were, naturally, the Christian minorities of his empire, and for the welfare of these did the European Powers (though not so much the Kaiser) seek to intervene. The Sultan was uncooperative, however, and the effect of such European interest was that Abdul Hamid came to view the two-and-a-half million Armenians in his empire with “obsessive fear and malevolence.” The Ottoman government followed a policy of harassment and extortion, and where the officials were less of a presence, the hostile Kurdish tribes more than made up for it.
With the ineffectiveness of the Western Powers all too evident, young Armenians in Turkey began to organize themselves into political parties (from 1885) with slogans such as “Liberty or Death!” Unfortunately, they were not in a nation where such efforts were tolerated, especially being second-class dhimmis in the eyes of the Muslim authorities. The Ottoman response was to organize, beginning in 1891, irregular cavalry regiments of Kurdish tribesmen with the official task of suppressing the Armenians; by 1892 they numbered fifteen thousand and were growing. In 1893, Armenian revolutionaries sought to stir up a Moslem revolt, but the end result was a welcome pretext for the Sultan to issue orders to massacre Armenian communities. Further displays of nationalism were met by the sword, and this extended even to those areas unaffected by Armenian nationalism. This aggression continued at least through 1896, culminating in up to two hundred and fifty thousand dead, with massacres from Trebizond, to Urfa (ancient Edessa, in which one-third of the population was Armenian), and to Istanbul itself, which finally gained the attention of the foreign embassies. The European Powers convened conferences, threatened action, and issued demands, but “once again disunity and indecision among the European powers gave the dwindling Ottoman Empire a further brief lease of life.” Beyond ineffectual verbage, in other words, nothing was done to help the doomed Armenians beyond appeasement. The rise of the Young Turks faction in the Ottoman government did not alter the Armenian policy, as another fifteen to twenty-five thousand were massacred at Adana in 1909.
These examples of systematic extermination, while certainly not new for Christians in the Ottoman Empire or, indeed, under any Moslem rule, did coincide with a rising American awareness of the greater world and, in effect, a new emphasis on foreign affairs. 1896 witnessed the very first international human rights resolution in American history – the Cullom resolution – condemning the Sultanate for the massacres. It is worth repeating the great potential that the American missionaries played in instilling a sense of nationalism in their Armenian pupils. The same Protestant ethic led to the creation of the National American Relief Committee, which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and even recruited Clara Barton to take her Red Cross teams to the Armenian provinces. The American consciousness was raised, and many of her most influential citizens demanded action of various kinds by the government (consider Theodore Roosevelt – but that should not come as too much of a surprise). This awareness continued through the First World War, significantly by way of relaying information by American missionaries and consulate officials.
Non-Turkish Perspective on the Armenian Genocide
The rise of Armenian nationalism in the nineteenth century led many Turks (especially the government) to be suspicious of them as potential fifth columnists. The outbreak of World War I witnessed the enrollment of many Armenians from the Caucasus into the Russian army with the avowed purpose of “liberating” Turkish Armenia. Though they may have been enticed with false optimism from the Tsar, the advance of the Russian army in the Caucasus and the maneuvering of Armenian revolutionaries (a small minority) gave the Young Turks an excuse to further restrict and oppress Armenians via a combination of massacres, deportations, and enslavement. The Turks were hard pressed at first, but “[t]he British failure at Gallipoli [in 1915] gave a breathing space to the Young Turk triumvirate, leaving it free to pursue, without external interference, a premeditated internal policy for the final elimination of the Armenian race.” The pretext was the proximity of many of them to the Russian front; many hundreds of thousands were massacred, and many of the rest died whilst being marched into deportation. The Ottomans trained and relied upon Turkish and Kurdish tribesman to harass the remaining Armenians across Turkey, looting and killing as they went along.
Christian males over the age of twelve were killed, and the others forcibly marched into the desert between Syria and Iraq; those who survived the deportation were mostly either enslaved or killed. Ye’or argues that this genocide contains all the elements inherent in a jihad against a Dhimmi people: deportation, enslavement, forced conversion, and massacre. As mentioned earlier, other Christian communities also suffered drastically, including the Jacobites and Assyrians. This attempted extermination of the Armenians is quite similar to the earlier attempts in the Balkans (with the rising nationalism of the earlier nineteenth century), with the exception being that the European groups were on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire and could thus more effectively appeal to and play the European Powers off of each other. The Armenians of Lesser Armenia and Cilicia, however, never reached a majority within Ottoman lands and the only power that they could truly appeal to was Russia; Tsarist rule of Anatolia, however, was imminently opposed by the other European Powers. Also, most of these European nations also ruled over large Moslem populations in their overseas domains, and thus sought to minimize the political effects of the Genocide, lest they stir up the populations further against their colonial forces.
[Click here for a detailed map of the affected areas.]
Turkish Perspectives on the “Armenian Genocide”
Henry Morgenthau, American Ambassador to Turkey, recorded a conversation in 1915 with Enver Pasha (one of the leaders of the Young Turk government) on the official position regarding the Turkish Armenian policy:
…We are now fighting for our lives at the Dardanelles and…we are sacrificing thousands of men. While we are engaged in such a struggle as this, we cannot permit people in our own country to attack us in the back…Russia, France, Great Britain, and America are doing the Armenians no kindness by sympathizing with and encouraging them…I am sure that if these outside countries did not encourage them, they would give up all their efforts to oppose the present government and become law-abiding citizens.
This line of reasoning is certainly logical enough, and consistent with much of Ottoman rhetoric.
The Russian army invaded Ottoman territory in November of 1914, eventually causing their opposing army to scatter and flee. Russian policy was to evacuate the willing Armenian population from their territory before advancing their army. The Ottomans soon did the same thing, however, yet with a different rationale, for it was impossible to determine which Armenians were loyal or innocent, and which were supporters of the Russian invader. Thus the Armenian inhabitants of Van, Bitlis, and Erzurum were completely evacuated to areas in northern Iraq and central Syria where they would not be a potential threat to Ottoman military operations. Shaw maintains that the evidence supports the government’s attempted protection of the Armenian refugee columns, despite tribal attacks, and of its overall good faith. He also uses figures from the Ottoman census showing an Armenian population of only 1,300,000, with about 200,000 dying from the deportation and other effects of war (alongside two million Moslems also dead). Indeed, Turkish apologists often refer to the Christian massacres as but a small part of the overall massive loss of life of all Anatolians, and this mostly at the hands of Kurdish militants.
The city of Van in the east came the closest of any Anatolian city of having an Armenian majority. With incitement by Armenian revolutionaries and Russian promises of military intervention, the Muslim population was expelled and many likewise massacred. Russian military assistance did indeed come and the Armenian population swelled. However, the Turks soon drove the Russians out and many tens of thousands of Armenians fled.
Attaturk’s new nationalist government sought to distance itself from the violent excesses of its Ottoman and Young Turk predecessors, but nonetheless did little enough to help religious and ethnic minorities and confiscated all Armenian property in 1931. Mustafa Kemal Attaturk himself stated: “These left-overs from the former Young Turk Party, who should have been made to account for the millions of our Christian subjects who were ruthlessly driven en masse, from their homes and massacred, have been restive under the Republican rule.” Such a blunt statement runs counter to allegations of Turkish governments both before and after that of the Father of the Turkish nation. Turkish officials tend to put the number of Armenian dead about 300,000, whereas Armenians claim 1.5 million dead. Howard suggests about one million, along with 300,000 Anatolian Greeks massacred. Either way, the ancient face of Anatolia was changed forever, with more to come.
The Distribution of the Armenian Population in Caucasia, 1914
The Distribution of the Armenian Population in Caucasia, 1926
Armistice did not mean the end of violence in Turkey, for she still had a long ways to go. Invasion by a Greek army and eventual Turkish civil war were only some of the many problems faced by Attaturk, the “Hero of Gallipoli.” Eventually, he smashed the Greeks and secured the borders of the Turkish state. The problem with being friendly towards an invading force is what to do when they are defeated and forced out. The Armenians and Greeks learned this to their great dismay, to say the least. Attaturk found himself in a very secure position and agreed in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne to an exchange of populations with Greece: around a million Greeks were forcibly exiled from Anatolia to Greece in return for about three hundred and fifty thousand Turkish Moslems from Greece. Only about sixty-five thousand Armenians and about one hundred and twenty thousand Greeks remained; Christians whose ancestors had resided in Anatolia for centuries and even millennia had numbered over twenty percent before the wars, but were now down to less than one percent.
Aftermath and Conclusion
When Hitler sent his death squads into Poland in 1939 with orders to kill any and all of the Polish race, he justified to his generals: “Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?” This is what a policy of appeasement and unjust self-interest results in. As if the Greek position was not bad enough after the massacres and exchange of populations through 1925, Greek Cypriot nationalism provided enough of an impetus for “the worst race riot in Europe since Kristallnacht” against Istanbul’s Christian population in September 1955. Turkish authorities did little to intervene, and sixty of the eighty remaining Orthodox churches in Istanbul were sacked or gutted. In 1923, there were about 400,000 Greek Christians in Istanbul, whereas this population has shrunk to a mere few thousand today. The Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople recorded over 2,500 ecclesiastical buildings in 1914; by 1974, there were only 913 buildings whose locations were still known, and of these 464 had completely disappeared, 252 were in ruins, and only 197 were usable.
The Turkish authorities continue to insist that there was no systematic extermination of the Armenian or any other Christian population. Western governments, however, are not convinced. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Hoover, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush have all paid tribute to the victims of the Armenian Genocide, and at least fourteen nations have formally acknowledged the historical tragedy of the Genocide. The European Parliament passed a resolution in 1987 recognizing Turkey’s refusal to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide as “an insurmountable obstacle” in its quest to join the European Community (predecessor of the European Union). The U.S. Congress deliberated passing a measure in 2000 recognizing the historical reality of the Armenian Genocide, but was convinced in the end by President Clinton that a formal measure was ultimately not in anyone’s interests. France, however, did affirm the Genocide, and, whilst in the moral right, paid for economically and politically (although short-term). While Turkey is in the extreme minority in its views, Western governments and Armenians themselves are quite willing to dialogue. The central proposal is that if the Turks wish to come clean, then simply open up the government archives to the public. Armenians have a victim mentality, but if all occurred as the Turks insist, then we shall see a much more complex story from the one the Armenians vocalize.
Besides the failure to open up sealed documents, however, the very fact that the Turkish government is still actively persecuting its Christian minorities (not to mention its substantial Kurdish population) makes for a lack of credibility. There are numerous accounts of systematic, deliberate destruction of Armenian churches (often with high explosives) and other cultural relics by government representatives. That there is a noticeable bias in favor of Turkish and Islamic architectural structures is obvious even to the casual tourist in Istanbul: mosques are actively restored and well financed, whereas churches are mostly left to the destructive forces of nature. Hilda Hulya Potuoglu was arrested and convicted in 1986 to between seven and fifteen years in jail for her literary contribution to the Encyclopedia Britannica in which she acknowledged historical Armenian Cilicia; the Britannica joined a growing list of forbidden books. One of the few remaining priests was provocatively asked in 2000 if he believed in the Assyrian Holocaust of 1915. He surprised the reporters (who were trying to influence the U.S. Congressional deliberations on the 1915 Genocide) by affirming it and was subsequently arrested facing treason. In a presentation delivered in 2000, Panayiotis Diamadis shares:
For those who believe deportations and executions of Assyrians are things of a distant past…we saw a video on the villages and monasteries of Tur Abdin in south-east Asia Minor. Village after village was either deserted or had recently become Kurdish. Two villages (one Christian, the other Kurdish) sit side-by-side in the foothills of the mountains where guerrillas of the Workers Party of Kurdistan (PKK) are active, fighting for an independent Kurdish state. On the pretext of this guerrilla activity, the Turkish Army deported the population of the Christian village to another settlement in the valley, further away from the mountains…the Kurdish village was left untouched. This is a familiar story...
As George Hintlian, curator of the Armenian Museum in Jerusalem, laments, “ Soon there will be virtually no evidence that the Armenians were ever in Turkey. We will have become a historical myth.” Turkey has great potential for religious tourism (a fact to which the government is awakening), yet beyond a minor, controlled situation, the policy seems to be that Turkey is for the Turks and they will prove that it has always been thus.
“Across the Middle East, it was above all the bloodshed of 1915 that destroyed ancient Christian cultures that had lasted successfully since Roman times, groups like the Jacobites, Nestorians, and Chaldeans” (and seriously devastated others including Armenians and Maronites). The Near East and Asia Minor are truly the birthplace of Christianity and it can only be sad that the Christian populations are depleting so rapidly – though currently mostly via immigration. Hundreds of thousands (and perhaps even 1.5 million) Armenians did perish in the last throes of the Ottoman Empire, and while the figures may be disputed, in context to their small numbers to begin with, the loss is greatly to be felt. All too often decisions are made with but short foresight, and the children feel the repercussions. Ask the Greek Cypriots in a few years if their decision to reject reunification with the Turkish Cypriots was truly the wise one. They should bow their heads, just as the Turkish government should reach out to the Armenians on their border and seek a new relationship, each repudiating the countless sins of their forebears and working for the future. We must remember, ultimately, that Christianity is not bound to any one geographic location, but by its very nature is transportable and adaptable.
Monastery of Holy Etchmiadzin, spiritual home of the Armenian Church
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