by Benny Morris
their goal, in his war time memoir:
Their passion for Turkifying the nation seemed to demand logically the
extermination of all Christians— Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians. Much
as they admired the Mohammedan conquerors of the fifteenth and
Conclusion
sixteenth centuries, they stupidly believed that these great warriors
had made one fatal mistake, for they had had it in their power com-
pletely to obliterate the Christian populations and had neglected to do
so. This policy in their opinion was a fatal error of statesmanship and
explained all the woes from which Turkey has suffered in modern
times.22
And Kemal, routinely careful in his public pronouncements, in Sep-
tember 1922 told Westerners that the country’s Christians “had to go.” By
then, of course, most had already “gone” under duress, either overseas or deep
into Turkey’s soil.
The mass slaughter and expulsion during 1914–1924 of the Assyrians is
the definitive “tell,” indicating that what the Turks sought was the elimina-
tion of Turkey’s Christians in toto, not this or that ethnic group that happened
to adhere to Chris tian ity. The Assyrians had no “national” po liti cal agenda
and were not thought by the Turks to have one. They did not engage in ter-
rorism. And they were so dispersed and demographically insignificant as to
threaten no one. Nonetheless they were murdered and expelled en masse.
Many in the West added a racial veneer to the explanation of Turkish
be hav ior: the murderousness was an expression of the Turks’ “character”;
here was “the terrible Turk” unchained. Most memorable in this re spect was
the anti- Turk charge sheet drawn up in the 1870s by Gladstone in his pam-
phlet, “Bulgarian Horrors,” which alleged the massacre of tens of thou-
sands of Christian innocents. Harold Nicolson, a cultivated British diplomat,
later put it very clearly: “Long residence in Constantinople had convinced
me that behind his mask of indolence, the Turk conceals impulses of the
most brutal savagery. . . . The Turks have contributed nothing whatsoever to
the pro gress of humanity; they are a race of Anatolian marauders.”23
But whether or not one believes that a nation can have an inherent character
and exhibit constant and predictable behavioral patterns, the destruction of
Turkey’s Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian communities during 1894–1924,
like most great historical events and pro cesses, was multilayered in its moti-
vation. And somewhat diff er ent motives or emphases powered the diff er ent
sectors of the Ottoman Muslim population. To be sure, religion and politics
Conclusion
were prevalent throughout both the organizers and the perpetrators. But there
were additional factors.
Kevorkian and other historians have pointed to “the construction of a
Turkish nation- state— the supreme objective of the Young Turks,” as an ad-
ditional motive of the CUP leadership in the post- Hamidian massacres. In-
deed, Kevorkian designates the 1915–1916 genocide “the act that gave birth
to the Turkish nation,” the bloody handmaiden of the republic. And he rightly
points to another major motive: expropriation of Christian property. This was
one of “the major objectives of the Young Turk policy of ethnically homoge-
nizing Asia Minor.”24
Economics drove Turks on two levels, national and personal. Nationally,
the rulers, from Abdülhamid and the CUP through Kemal, all sought to lay
their hands on the vast wealth Christians possessed— land, houses, money,
businesses. In part, they hoped that the transfer of assets from Christian to
Turkish hands would help empower Turks and foster a “national” and “mod-
ernized” Turkish economy.25 By the fin de siècle, the minority communities appeared to have too much economic power and too many financial assets:
in 1900 twenty of twenty- one metalworking factories in the empire were
owned by Christians; in Bursa, thirty- three raw- silk manufactories were owned
by Christians and only six by Muslims. (Two were owned by the govern-
ment.)26 But the Turkish leaders— especially Kemal— were also driven by
other economic considerations. They needed money to finance their suc-
cessive, impoverishing wars, and they had to house and put on their feet
the destitute Muslim muhacirs who had been cast out of the Balkans and
Caucasus.
Alongside national considerations, there was the personal motivation of
greed. Among the perpetrators— local officials, soldiers and gendarmes, mob
members, and Kurdish tribesmen— there was envy of the better- off, or alleg-
edly better- off, Christians and the desire to despoil them of their lands and
houses, house hold possessions, money, and farm animals. Almost every at-
tack on Christians during 1894–1896 and 1919–1923 was accompanied or
followed by massive looting, and in some cases the assaults were actually pre-
ceded by a call to loot. During 1914–1916, too, a great deal of “neighborly”
plunder accompanied the exit of the Greek and Armenian deportees.
Conclusion
Similarly a desire for revenge was operative on the national and personal
levels. Destroying the Ottoman Christians was payback for the territorial losses
and humiliations meted out to the empire and the Turks since the 1820s by
the Christian powers and rebellious Christian minorities, from the Balkans
to the Caucasus. And millions of Turks— including muhacirs and CUP
leaders— had personal accounts to settle with Christians whose “cousins” had
dispossessed them and their families and driven them to Anatolia.
Punishment and deterrence were also impor tant motivators for those un-
leashing the anti- Armenian pogroms, especially in 1894–1896. Massacres
would dampen Armenian enthusiasm to push for “reforms,” let alone in de-
pen dence, and for individual civil rights. Moreover, once embarked on
genocide, the CUP leaders understood that they could not look back, and the
mission had to be completed; Armenians left alive would doubtless seek
revenge.
The perpetrators included Ottoman and Turkish regular troops; Turkish
irregulars, including Kurdish Hamidiye regiments; Kurdish tribesmen;
Turkish, Laz, Arab, Chechen, and Circassian villa gers; many Muslim towns-
people, and muhacirs. In 1894–1896 the massacres were carried out initially
by soldiers and Hamidiye cavalry, and then by a mix— diff er ent in diff er ent
sites—of soldiers, gendarmes, and civilians. In 1909 the main perpetrators
were Turkish and Kurdish civilians and army units sent “to restore order.” In
1915–1916 the murderers were a mix of Turkish soldiers and gendarmes;
Kurdish, Turkmen, and, occasionally Arab tribesmen; Special Organ ization
members; and Chechen and other irregulars. In 1919–1923 the killers were
soldiers and Nationalist irregulars, gendarmes, Kurdish tribesmen, and villa-
gers and townspeople.
Among perpetrators and local officials alike, sexual gratification seems to
have played a major role in the assault on the Christians, to judge by the sheer
volume of rapes and abductions du
ring the successive bouts of vio lence. It is
probable that rape and the abduction of women and children also served as
an assertion of social and religious mastery, especially in socie ties governed
by traditional repressive sexual norms. Perhaps it was understood in some
levels of Turkish officialdom that the production of babies thus engendered
would enhance Muslim numbers and help in the destruction of the Christian
communities. The bouts of vio lence were characterized by an atmosphere of
Conclusion
absolute sexual permissiveness vis- à- vis Christians. We have encountered no
evidence that any Muslim in the Ottoman Empire or Turkey was punished
for raping, abducting, or enslaving a Christian during 1894–1924. Indeed,
rape and abduction throughout the period seem to have been tacitly approved,
if not promoted, by the Ottoman and Turkish authorities. Such acts were never
publicized or condemned by Ottoman or Turkish spokesmen. Rather, as with
the mass murders, the official line was consistently one of blanket denial while
charging Christians with the very offences Muslims committed against them.
Following World War II, commentators compared the Armenian genocide to
the Nazi destruction of Eu ro pean Jewry. Even the term “Holocaust”— Greek
for conflagration— was occasionally used in descriptions of the 1894–1923
massacres of Christians; the massacres often saw Christians burnt to death in
churches. Indeed, Hitler at one point reportedly referred to the “annihilation
of the Armenians” when envisioning the coming destruction of Eu rope’s
“lesser” peoples. And throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the German ultra-
nationalists, especially the Nazis, revered Kemal. They held up the Turkish
“purification” of Anatolia, of its Armenians and Greeks, as a model in achieving
the desired völkisch state.27 Without doubt the twentieth- century wars in which the Germans and Turks participated brutalized both peoples, a pre-condition for implementing genocide.
But the Holocaust and the Thirty- Year Genocide were diff er ent in impor-
tant ways. For one thing, Hitler’s racist views led to the biological definition
of the Jews and to their destruction. Jews who had converted, or whose par-
ents had converted, to Chris tian ity were not usually spared, and conversion
offered no path to safety. In Turkey, by contrast, conversion sometimes as-
sured salvation, and Turks and other Muslims willingly, indeed eagerly, took
in Christian women and children and turned them into Muslim Turks,
Kurds, or Arabs. Such integration or absorption of Jews into the German
national body under the Nazis was unthinkable; the Nazis, indeed, treated
sex between Aryans and Jews as a crime. (However, it is also worth noting
that the Nazi Germans kidnapped as many as 200,000 Slavic children for
“adoption” and “Germanization” during 1940–1945, in a practice resem-
bling the Turks’ with re spect to Christians during and after WWI.28) The
Turks, if anything, promoted cross- religious and cross- racial sex between
Conclusion
Muslim men and Christian women, with the offspring automatically bol-
stering Muslim numbers.
The two genocides differed also in their degree of efficiency. The Armenian
and Greek deportation- and- murder pro cesses, while centrally or ga nized, first
from Constantinople, then from Ankara, were somewhat chaotic, reflecting
the relatively slipshod nature of Ottoman and Turkish administrations, the
difficult geography of Anatolia, and the comparative backwardness of its
communications networks. At times, too, there seems to have been a mea sure
of dissonance at the top. In 1915–1916, while Talât and Enver were as one
regarding the anti- Armenian policy and its execution, the third CUP tri-
umvir, Cemal appears at times to have preferred utilizing Armenians as la-
borers rather than killing them. Occasionally, from his perch in Greater
Syria, he disobeyed or circumvented Talât’s murderous directives. But chaos
also affected areas beyond Cemal’s domain. Contradictory orders sometimes
emanated from Constantinople, usually after complaints by ambassadors. One
day the localities were ordered to murder all Armenians; the next, orders ar-
rived exempting Protestants and Catholics. Here, conversion assured salva-
tion; there, executions followed hard upon conversions. Corruption, too, took
its toll, with wealthy Christians managing to abort or at least delay death by
paying bribes. And the weather occasionally interfered. Gendarmes were
sometimes averse to deportation marches through snowcapped mountains,
which led to delays, though rarely to long- term salvation.
The destruction of Eu rope’s Jews and other “racial inferiors” was carried
out far more methodically and systematically, with a uniformity of purpose
and method at each stage, and in concentrated fashion over a five or six year
period. The Nazis managed to kill 6 million Jews and millions of others,
whereas the Turks killed “only” a third or quarter of that number in staggered
fashion over a thirty- year period. To be sure, some of the means the Nazis em-
ployed changed as the pro cess unfolded. At the start, in 1940–1941, Jews
were killed by gunfire and, in the ghettos and concentration camps into which
they had been herded, hunger and disease. The shootings and ghettoization
were then replaced by gassing in extermination camps, though concentration
camps and forced labor continued to exist and exact a major toll in blood well
into 1945.
Conclusion
Throughout, the pro cess was marked by clear, stringent organ ization from
the top and executed with consistency by the units in the field, primarily the
SS but also the Wehrmacht and the order police and their non- German aux-
iliaries. The Jews, in the hundreds of thousands, and then millions, were
methodically murdered, a virtual production line of death. Almost no one
managed to escape from the death camps, and very few survived mass shoot-
ings. There were no deviations from the system or purpose; almost no one
was spared. Bribes were of no use, and humanity rarely came into play. The
perpetrators simply, meticulously did their job. There was almost no dissent
and even less disobedience. All acted like cogs in an efficient machine.
During the Turkish genocide, sympathetic Muslims managed to save some
Christians, and humane officials resisted or delayed orders to deport and kill.
The anti- Jewish campaign was not based on personal sadism, of the sort
exhibited by SS officer Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List (1993). (In this sense the movie was misleading.) Cruelty was pervasive, of course, and massive suffering was inflicted. But suffering was not the perpetrators’ purpose. In most
cases the pro cess was impersonal and cold, and geared only to extermina-
tion. The Turks’ mass murder and deportation of the Christians during
1894–1924, on the other hand, was highly upfront and personal and in-
volved countless acts of individual sadism. Where the Nazis used guns and
gas, many of the murdered Christians were killed with knives, bayonets,
axes, and stones; thousands were burned alive (the Nazis burned corpses);
; tens of thousands of women and girls were gang- raped and murdered; clerics
were crucified; and thousands of Christian dignitaries were tortured— eyes
gouged out, noses and ears cut off, feet turned to mush— before being exe-
cuted. In terms of the be hav ior of the perpetrators, on the level of individual
actions, the Turkish massacre of the Christians was far more sadistic than
the Nazi murder of the Jews.
Another major difference is that many Armenians and Greeks— especially
in 1894–1896, 1909, and 1919–1923— were murdered by civilians, not sol-
diers or gendarmes, and here and there women and children participated in
the killings. Only in 1915–1916 was the murder, of Armenians, handled pri-
marily by the military, paramilitary units, and gendarmes, though Turkish villa-
gers and Kurdish tribesmen also took part. Throughout, the bulk of Turkey’s
Conclusion
civilians saw what was happening to their neighbors, or other wise knew, and
largely approved of it.
During the Holocaust German civilians were almost never involved in the
killing, which occurred mainly in Poland and the Soviet Union. (Of course,
this later enabled many Germans to claim they had not known what was going
on.) At worst they saw their Jewish neighbors being rounded up and sent off;
they rarely witnessed an actual killing. In Turkey the whole death- dealing pro-
cess was routinely accompanied by robbery and looting for personal gain by
townspeople, villa gers, and tribesmen. The number of Muslim civilians per-
sonally involved, directly and indirectly, in the deportation and mass murder
of Christians during 1894–1924 must have been enormous.
Lastly, the two genocidal processes— against the Jews and against the
Christians— occurred on very diff er ent time- scales. The murderous persecu-
tion of the Jews lasted five years or, if one begins the count from Kristallnacht
in November 1938, seven years. The Christians of Turkey suffered three de-
cades of persecution even though there were years of relative “quiet” between
each murderous bout. This meant that the Armenians— less so the Greeks and
Assyrians— underwent an almost unrelenting torment: an Armenian woman
from eastern Anatolia, born in the 1880s, would likely have seen her parents
