Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi come to shake the "calm" Turkish waters for good with their fresh archival work! The remarkable book by two prominent Israeli historians, "Thirty-Year Genocide by Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi" (Harvard University Press), recalls the massacre of Armenians by the Turks during World War I. A massacre that took place in the broader context of the way in which the Turks treated the minorities.
The authors note that between 1894 and 1924, the Turks exterminated four million Christians (Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians) in Asia Minor in three successive waves of purges. The first was during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid, the second by the Neo-Turks and the third by Kemal Ataturk. In December 1895, one in two Armenians in the city of Urfa was massacred in response to false news about the massacre of Muslims by Armenians. "Jews and donkeys" were used to remove the dead.
After strong pressure from the British and Russians during World War I, the Turks considered the Armenians a fifth phalanx, but even before the start of the war the Greeks had already been expelled to the Dardanelles. The authors believe that the systematic assassinations of 1915 were "a crystallized policy of the empire for wider targeted killings, not accidentally." The Armenians were a disease "that deserved and required eradication."
Morris and Ze'evi discovered that the revelatory documents had already disappeared from the Turkish archives before the archives opened in the 1980s.
Horror still from allies of the Turks
However, the reports of foreign diplomats that were not in favor of the Armenians could not be censored. These included reports by German and Austro-Hungarian diplomats who were then allies of the Ottoman Empire-Turkey. These diplomats [although allies of the Turks] used exactly the same language as their British and French counterparts to describe the horror of all this to their superiors in Berlin and Vienna respectively.
After the occupation of Izmir by Ataturk in September 1922, Greek and Armenian houses were destroyed by fire, as well as Jewish and Christian cemeteries. The remaining 4.500 Assyrians fell victim to persecution. The Turks may have invoked jihad, but the authors believe that Muslim law was often cited to justify their actions. A British naval officer even wondered if all this could be done without the full knowledge of the Turkish authorities.
The authors compare and contrast the killings with those of the Jews during the Jewish Soha. For example, embracing Christianity in Nazi Germany would not save him. On the contrary, decades earlier, Islamization in the Ottoman Empire could have saved the lives of non-Muslims who converted.
The Turks may have killed fewer than the Germans during the Nazi era, but the nature of the Turkish killings is shocking: Girls who were silenced and raped and Christian clergymen crucified! As Morris and Ze'evi write: "As for the behavior of the perpetrators at the level of individual actions, the Turkish massacre of Christians was much more sadistic than the Nazi murder of the Jews." A warning, perhaps, from history that this diligent work takes us back to those days of political unrest.
* The author of the article in The Jewish Chronicle is Colin Shindler, Emeritus Professor of Israeli Studies at the University of London. (Edited by Slpress.gr)
Source: SigmaLive