by Benny Morris
researchers today will find almost no documentation incriminating Ottoman
Turkish leaders in the ethnic cleansings between 1894 and 1924. Similarly,
the many volumes of state documents covering these years, which the Turkish
government has published over the past few de cades, contain almost no di-
rect evidence of Turkish culpability.
While much has been whitewashed, a good deal was never archived in the
first place. Knowing that they were ordering or engaged in criminal activity,
Introduction
the po liti cal leaders in Constantinople and in the provinces, often in real time, ordered all copies of tele grams destroyed after reading. Sometimes they
transmitted instructions orally, to avoid leaving paper trails, or used euphe-
misms to camouflage their intentions and deeds. The same, apparently, is
true of reports going up the chain of command, from local officials and com-
manders to Constantinople.6
A scholar relying only, or principally, on Turkish state archives and
published Turkish official volumes will inevitably produce highly distorted
history of Turkish- Christian relations from the beginning of the Hamidian
period, in 1876, until the end of the ethnic cleansing in 1924. Countless
Turkish and “pro- Turkish” historians have done just that.
How do we know that the Ottoman and Turkish archives have been
purged of incriminating materials? There are some clear indications. First,
hundreds of large- scale massacres were committed throughout the period we
have studied. This is no longer a matter of opinion, and even those who claim
that there was no deliberate and or ga nized genocide do not question that many
massacres took place. Yet in all the accessible archival and published docu-
mentation on the events of 1914–1916, there are just a handful of mentions
of “improper treatment.” In the only such accessible Turkish document openly
admitting a massacre by the Ottoman side, a cabinet minister berates a gov-
ernor for also murdering non- Armenians, in contravention of his orders.
Second, se nior officials resisting orders to deport and massacre were re-
called, punished, and replaced. Several were executed. There is hardly any
mention of this in the accessible correspondence. Occasionally, the archival
purge was insufficiently thorough, and one or two letters from recalcitrant gov-
ernors have surfaced. But the government’s responses and reactions are al-
ways missing.
Third, there is almost no mention of the actions of the Special Organ ization
(Teşkilat- ı mahsusa), whose operatives played a prominent role in the destruc-
tion of the Armenians. Even if, as some critics argue, the Special Organ ization
was not, as a body, part of the extermination pro cess, the absence of Special
Organ ization operatives and activities from the accessible documentation
attests to the archival cleansing.
Fourth, according to external materials, CUP stalwarts and Special
Organ ization executives such as Dr. Bahaettin Şakır and Dr. Selanikli Mehmet
Introduction
Nȃzım (Nȃzım Bey) orchestrated massacres, and provincial party secretaries
played key roles. Their powers often exceeded those of governors and mili-
tary commanders. The archives and officially published documentation con-
tain almost no correspondence from these CUP members and provincial
secretaries.
Fifth, in the brief, largely inconclusive postwar trials conducted by the
Ottoman government under Allied tutelage, a substantial number of tele-
grams were presented as evidence of massacres and murderous intent. Many
of these documents have dis appeared. Historians who pres ent the official
Turkish narrative argue that the documents were fakes.
Fi nally, the fact that Turkey has always barred researchers from viewing
1914–1924 materials in the Ankara military archive strongly suggests that the
state is hiding something.
Akçam offers the most comprehensive description of Turkish archival
manipulation and obfuscation.7 At the end of World War I, Talât Pasha
hurriedly gathered and burned every government document related to the
Armenian genocide that he could find. So did the new grand vizier, Ahmet
İzzet Pasha.8 Members of the CUP Central Committee, including Nȃzım, did
the same for relevant CUP documentation. Purges of documentation con-
tinued in stages, long after the establishment of the republic. The archives
were opened to foreign researchers in the 1980s, but only after government
agents would have had a chance to locate any remaining incriminating mate-
rial and ensure it would not be seen. Even as researchers were first gaining
entry, it was well known that a group of retired diplomats and military officers
had privileged access, which they could have used to destroy evidence.9 On
the basis of information provided by other researchers, we believe that a final
purge was conducted more recently, during the digitization of the archives.
Readers today initially have access only to digitized documents.
But the main reason not to trust the Turkish archives is that reliable sources
contradict them. Masses of 1894–1924 German, Austro- Hungarian, British,
American, and French documents, produced by diplomats and consular
officials working in Turkey and available in Western archives, as well as the
papers of dozens of Western missionaries who worked in Turkey during
those years, tell a completely diff er ent story from the one purveyed in official, accessible Turkish papers and in Turkish nationalist narratives.
Introduction
For de cades, Turkish apologists and their supporters have dismissed this
Western documentation as tendentious and even specious, the invention of
prejudiced Christians aiming to vilify blameless Muslims. As seen from Con-
stantinople, Britain, France, and the United States were allied against the Turks during the First World War, so their official documents must have been anti-Turkish propaganda. The Christian missionaries, most of them Americans,
were deemed even worse. They were intimately connected to the Armenians
and had themselves fomented anti- Turkish and anti- Muslim sentiment among
Christians. How could they be expected to produce unprejudiced accounts
of Turkish, Armenian, and Greek actions and thinking during the de cades
when Turks and Christians were busy “fighting each other”? (Turks have long,
and falsely, characterized the events of this thirty- year period as mutual blood-
letting and warfare rather than as genocide.)
This dismissal of American, British, and French documentation is highly
problematic. For one thing, it wrongly presumes that foreign diplomatic
opinion toward Turkey was uniform. There were many foreign diplomats in the
Ottoman Empire—in 1905, the British alone had twenty- nine consulates—
and they were not all of one mind. Most British, French, and American
diplomats and consuls pres ent during 1894–1924 prob ably did see the local
Christians as persecuted underdogs, but others were neutral. Still others— most prominently High Commissioner Mark Bristol, the top U.S. representative in
Turkey during August 1919–1927— favored the Turks and dismissed Greeks
and Armenia
ns as pusillanimous and inferior races. Bristol was not alone in
harboring such sentiments.
Moreover, while many Western diplomats and officers may have shared,
and even displayed, pro- Christian sympathies, almost all were profes-
sionals. They were trained and expected to report accurately what they
saw, while, of course, casting a positive light on their own activities and
their governments’ policies. British, American, and French reporting was
classified and for internal, institutional consumption, not designed to sway
public opinion or international mediators. If their reports were “anti-
Turkish,” this was mainly because they heard about or witnessed be hav ior
and attitudes that were brutal and often criminal.
It is particularly impor tant that French sources corroborate stories of mas-
sacres, forced deportation, and, in general, ethnic cleansing. That is because
Introduction
the French were typically less “pro- Christian” than were their Anglo- Saxon
allies, certainly before and after 1914–1918. French diplomacy during 1920–
1924 tended to be pro- Turkish, and the French military, while fighting the
Turks during 1920–1921, tended to have a jaundiced view of the Armenians,
Greeks, and even the British. The French army in Turkey was largely com-
posed of Muslim colonial troops, and their superior officers had to take these
soldiers’ affinity for local Muslim populations into account in their dealings
with Turks.
Accusations against Christian, and especially American, missionaries are
no more persuasive than those against foreign officials. Most missionaries were
well- educated and liberal, albeit deeply Christian, in outlook. Diligently
following Ottoman rules, they had come to work only with Christian denom-
inations, not to illegally convert Muslims. They did wish to protect Christians
from harm and often supplied them with aid, but they rarely deliberately en-
deavored to undermine the state. By and large their reports, like those of the
diplomats and officers, were intended for internal, not outsiders’, perusal.
The missionaries were writing to superiors, friends, and family to inform
them as accurately as pos si ble of what they saw, heard, and understood. Few
of them had great sympathy for Muslim Turks or Kurds but all shared a
common fear of divine and collegial reproach and so tried to cleave to the
truth.
In addition to reports from missionaries and British, French, and Amer-
ican diplomats, in some chapters we have used extensively reports by German
and Austrian diplomats, residents, and travelers in Turkey. German- Ottoman
relations began warming a few years before World War I, and Austria- Hungary
and Germany were the Ottoman Empire’s main allies in the war. Some offi-
cers in the higher echelons of the German army condoned the Armenian de-
portations; many didn’t. While Germans and Austrians had nothing to gain
from tarnishing the Ottoman reputation, their reports from the provinces
during 1914–1918 almost invariably parallel and corroborate the findings of
Allied counter parts: Muslim- Turkish genocidal and expulsionist intent and
the butchery of masses of unarmed Christians. Reports and diary entries by
German and Scandinavian missionaries tell the same story.
The German diplomatic reports, as well as reports by German travelers and
German- linked missionaries, were assembled from the German Foreign
Introduction
Ministry archive by a German scholar, Wolfgang Gust. They are published
online at www . armenocide . com and in a densely packed, 786- page En glish
translation. We have also used a similar volume of Austro- Hungarian diplo-
matic reports emanating from Turkey during the war.
Further corroboration comes from postwar trials of war criminals in
Constantinople, memoirs and speeches by Turkish officials, and interviews
published in Turkish newspapers and journals. And while, as we have noted,
there are serious prob lems with Turkish state archives and official documen-
tation, these are not totally useless. We have combed them thoroughly and
have found documents that help explain what happened. Often they rein-
force the evidence in Western sources. We have also relied on secondary
lit er a ture, which, in the case of Turkish- Armenian relations during World
War I, has burgeoned in recent years.
Although we have made every effort to be comprehensive in our use of ar-
chival materials, we realize that a great deal is missing. This was, after all, the intention of those covering their tracks. If more Turkish sources were available, we would have included them. We believe, though, that the documenta-
tion we have used is a sufficient basis for a credible description and analy sis
of what happened. The reader will judge.
I
Abdülhamid II
1
Nationalist Awakenings in the
Nineteenth- Century Ottoman Empire
For many in the Ottoman Empire, the first months of 1878 were a night-
mare come true. Rus sian artillery batteries pounded the suburbs of Constan-
tinople, and the empire’s Eu ro pean provinces were all but lost. Large
chunks of the Caucasus and northeast Anatolia, as far as Erzurum, were
overrun by the Rus sian army, the Ottomans’ age- old nemesis. The imperial
coffers were empty, and a new, authoritarian regime was doing its best to
sweep away hard- won civil liberties.1
Only a year or so earlier, the situation looked very diff er ent. Not only was
life relatively peaceful, but it also seemed that a mea sure of open- mindedness
had taken hold. On December 23, 1876, after a century of incremental legal
reforms, Turkey adopted a modern constitution. Drawn up mainly by the re-
formist minister Midhat Pasha and his Armenian companion Krikor Odian,
the charter promised a new bill of rights for all and improved status for the
empire’s non- Muslim subjects. Midhat hoped that by guaranteeing certain
freedoms and protections for minorities, including Christians, the empire
might stave off threatened Eu ro pean encroachment. The constitution even
placed some constraint on the sultan, forcing him to share power with a senate
of grandees— albeit, subject to his own appointment— and a chamber of
deputies selected by an electoral college directly elected at the provincial
level.2
Midhat and fellow reformists had taken advantage of a moment of anarchy.
In May 1876 the veteran sultan Abdülaziz, under whose reign the pace of west-
ernization had quickened, was deposed in a coup d’état. His opponents
accused him of squandering the country’s assets on grand homes and
Abdülhamid
II
grand ships. He was replaced by Murad V, his nephew, but the new sultan was
ousted after only three months, when it emerged that he was mentally un-
stable. He was replaced by his brother, Abdülhamid II, who was believed to
be sympathetic to the reformist cause.
But even as the reformists were formulating the constitution and electoral
system, the stage was being set for the Rus sian invasion. The immediate cause
was a rebellion in the Ottoman territory of Bulgaria.
The empire was already
on shaky ground, brought to the edge of bankruptcy by an exceptionally long
dry spell and a welter of high- interest loans coming due. The Bulgarian up-
rising added to these considerable woes. Determined to protect his rule and
his empire from existential threats, Abdülhamid responded with a hard line.
He moved to crush the Bulgarian rebellion, curtail the new freedoms, reinstate
An Armenian volunteer
soldier during the
Balkan Wars. Some
Armenians fought in the
Ottoman army, while
others joined Bulgarian
and Rus sian
combat units.
Nationalist Awakenings
his authority, and restore order and discipline. He suspended the constitu-
tion; dispersed the parliament; and sent his irregulars, the Başı Bozuks, to
quash the Bulgarians.
The Bulgarian suppression triggered outrage in the West, especially in
Britain, where former Prime Minister William Gladstone and his opposition
Liberal Party decried the cruelty of the “Turkish race” and what soon became
known as the “Bulgarian atrocities.” Gladstone memorably wrote of the Turks,
“They were, upon the whole, from the black day when they first entered
Eu rope, the one great anti- human specimen of humanity. Wherever they
went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them, and as far as their
dominion reached, civilisation dis appeared from view.”3 Outraged Eu ro pe ans
called for Balkan liberation from Ottoman rule.
This was the opening Rus sia needed. Exploiting the anti- Turkish fervor
and claiming its position as standard- bearer of a new pan- Slavic conscious-
ness, the tsar moved to rescue his Bulgarian protégés and attack a traditional
foe. In April 1877 Rus sian forces passed through Romania and crossed the
Danube. Another Rus sian army invaded eastern Anatolia. By summer, the
Ottoman army was in retreat, and the Rus sians had occupied Edirne (Adri-
anople) and eastern Thrace. The road to Constantinople was open.
Germany, Britain, and France refused to take sides, leading to condemna-
tion from Abdülhamid. However, notwithstanding the sultan’s suspicions of
collusion against him, the three powers were not in cahoots with the Rus sians
