{"id":78247,"date":"2021-06-18T07:43:53","date_gmt":"2021-06-18T12:43:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=78247"},"modified":"2021-06-18T07:43:53","modified_gmt":"2021-06-18T12:43:53","slug":"a-question-of-survival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=78247","title":{"rendered":"A Question of Survival"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By the standards of the Great War, the Turkish army that was encamped near Sardarabad in Eastern Armenia was an after-thought.\u00a0 13,000 Turkish and Kurdish soldiers, with 40 pieces of heavy artillery (albeit many outdated cannons), sat waiting to continue the Ottoman Empire’s invasion of the rapidly disintegrating Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic on May 21st, 1918.\u00a0 With the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk<\/a> having effectively broken up the Russian Empire, the fate of the Caucasus lay in a state of political flux, with the Turks, Bolsheviks, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians and even Germans vying for a measure of control of the oil-rich region.\u00a0 The political vacuum had emboldened the Turks to invade and the fledging Transcaucasian Republic lacked the resources – and political will – to challenge it.\u00a0 By May of 1918, most of Western Armenia had been conquered and Eastern Armenia looked ripe to fall as well.<\/p>\n

The call to defend what remained of Armenia echoed throughout the countryside.\u00a0 “Carts drawn by oxen, water buffalo, and cows jammed the roads bringing food, provisions, ammunition, and volunteers” as thousands of Armenians rallied at the capitol of Yerevan.\u00a0 For the civilians of Yerevan, defeat would not just mean a loss of political independence but very likely the loss of their lives.\u00a0 The Turkish invasion had continued the Ottoman policy of Armenian genocide which had already claimed up to 1.5 million Armenian lives.\u00a0 For in the words of one British historian, if the Armenians failed to stop the Ottoman invasion “it is perfectly possible that the word Armenia would have henceforth denoted only an antique geographical term.”<\/p>\n

The remains of Armenian victims<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u201cWho, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?\u201d\u00a0 – Adolf Hitler<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The fate of the Armenian people had been part-and-parcel of Europe’s general concern of the treatment of Christian minorities within the Ottoman Empire since the mid-19th Century.\u00a0 Having defended the Ottomans against the Russians, including fighting for the Turks in the Crimean War, Britain and France began to question the relative wisdom of propping up a regime in Constantinople that so plainly repressed the rights of fellow Christians.\u00a0 As subsequent revolts occurred throughout the Ottoman Empire, freeing Christian populations like the Serbs and Greeks, while prompting even greater restrictions and cruelties from the Turks in response, Western Europe began applying pressure to the Ottomans lest they lose support in their wars against the Tsar.<\/p>\n

The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 highlighted this dilemma.\u00a0 The Russians had defeated the Turks, gaining Christian populations in Europe and the Caucasus and placing the “Armenian Question” in the forefront of European diplomatic concerns.\u00a0 In the aftermath of their defeat, the Turks had run rampant in their remaining Armenian provinces, killing, raping and converting the populace.\u00a0 Such actions made it politically difficult to support negotiating a removal of Russian forces from Armenian territory.\u00a0 What guarantees could the Turks provide they wouldn’t continue their violence against Armenians in those lands once their temporary Russian protectors had left?\u00a0 The resulting Congress of Berlin gave back Turkey the lands they had lost with only modest, unenforceable language on improving the treatment of Armenians in the treaty.\u00a0 The meaning was lost on no one – the Ottomans had slaughtered thousands of their own civilians following their military defeat and not only had the West given them back most of their territory, but done nothing to hold the Turks accountable for their behavior.\u00a0 As novelist Victor Hugo noted, “If a man is killed in Paris, it is a murder; the throats of fifty thousand people are cut in the East, and it is a question.”<\/p>\n

“It’s ‘ard to ‘ave to disturb ‘im\u2013’e’s such a good customer!” – a British op-ed cartoon of the era\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n

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In the spring of 1915, with his armies having been consecutively defeated trying to invade the Russian Caucasus<\/a> and Persia<\/a> in a matter of months, Enver Pasha had a culprit – the Armenians.\u00a0 In the decades following the Congress of Berlin, with every major political shift in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians had inevitability been blamed and attacked.\u00a0 The Young Turk revolution that neutered the Ottoman monarchy?\u00a0 Armenians were killed as enemies of the revolution.\u00a0 The Balkan Wars?\u00a0 The Armenians were “internal tumors” that needed to be removed lest the Turks lose their Anatolian homeland.\u00a0 The 1913 failed counterrevolution that tried to bring back the monarchy?\u00a0 The Armenians were now too loyal to the Young Turks and thus had to be ethnical cleansed again.\u00a0 Enver was simply reading from a playbook that had served the Turks for nearly 40 years.<\/p>\n

Defeat on the battlefield meant the few remaining Armenians in the military could no longer be trusted.\u00a0 Enver transformed all Christian soldiers in the eastern provinces into labor battalions, digging ditches and building roads.\u00a0 Thousands of new labor battalions conscripts were required of Armenians and when the city of Van, home to a near-majority Armenian population, attempted to resist, the local Ottoman commander insisted<\/a> \u201cI shall kill every Christian man, woman, and\u201d (pointing to his knee) \u201cevery child, up to here.\u201d\u00a0 The Turks made good on their threat – 55,000 Armenian civilians, half the Armenian population of Van, were killed in a month-long siege.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

Van would become the turning point for both the Ottomans and the Armenians.\u00a0 The Armenians had previously agreed to follow Turkish orders for conscription and the surrender of their weapons, believing that refusing to submit to such orders would be the rationale for further repression.\u00a0 But it was clear the Turks intended to answer the “Armenian Question” once and for all.\u00a0 Thousands of Armenian political figures and intellectuals were rounded up in late April of 1915.\u00a0 Most were executed; some were tortured first until they “confessed” to an empire-wide plot to overthrow the Turkish government.\u00a0 The Turks had their “evidence.”\u00a0 The thousands of former soldiers now placed into labor battalions were killed as enemies of the state.\u00a0 Armenian civilians in eastern Anatolia would be forcibly relocated to the Syrian desert.\u00a0 The head of the Young Turk political party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), Talaat Pasha, made it plain what the deportations intended to do – it was the “definitive solution to the Armenian Question.”<\/p>\n

An Armenian family marches near the desert – most Armenians were killed in this method; simply marching them to death in harsh conditions, without access to food or water<\/p><\/div>\n

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The Turkish position on the Armenian deportations – then and now – stated that they were justified in the name of national security.\u00a0 But even if one takes such statements at face value, they cannot justify the implementation of the deportations.\u00a0 Villages and cities were emptied, with Armenian property being confiscated.\u00a0 Adult men (really, any male 12 or above) would be separated from the rest and either conscripted or shot.\u00a0 Turkish commanders told their soldiers to “do to [the women] whatever you wish”, resulting in a systematic campaign of rape.\u00a0 Many of those women who survived both the sexual assault and deportation found themselves in Damascus where they were displayed sometimes naked and sold as sex slaves.\u00a0 But relatively few made the journey alive.\u00a0 In one example, 40,000 Armenians were deported out of the city of Erzurum, forced to make their way to the eastern Syrian desert city of Deir ez-Zor.\u00a0 Fewer than 200 arrived.<\/p>\n

The deportations were likely intended as death marches, given the lack of food or water that Turkish authorities had prepared.\u00a0 But just because the Ottomans had intended to exterminate the Armenians didn’t mean they were well-organized in doing so.\u00a0 Much of the dirty work was outsourced to other ethnic groups like Chechens or Kurds who viewed the Armenians as allies to the Russians who had equally oppressed and brutalized them.\u00a0 Bodies – evidence of the Turkish campaign – were littered across Anatolia and thousands of the dead were thrown into rivers and canals.\u00a0 Corpses could be found clogging waterways including the Tigris as far south as the Persian Gulf.\u00a0 The scale of the campaign was nearly impossible to conceal and the Turks hardly attempted to hide what they were doing.<\/p>\n

Surviving the march was basically trading one hell for another.\u00a0 By the fall of 1915, an estimated 870,000 Armenians had arrived in Syria – only 500,000 would be alive by the time of the next census of the camps at the start of 1916.\u00a0 The camps would be subject to Turkish reprisals and raids from Arab tribes eager to loot what they could.\u00a0 News was spreading of the Turkish atrocities.\u00a0 Even Germany began to criticize their Ottoman ally, informing Taalat Pasha in early 1916 that Berlin fully expected all Armenians to be allowed to return home once the war was over.\u00a0 Taalat responded by moving 200,000 Armenians out of the Deir ez-Zor camps, killing some directly and leaving the rest without food or water to succumb to the elements.<\/p>\n

Life inside an Armenian camp in Syria<\/p><\/div>\n

By 1917, there were almost no Armenians left within the Ottoman Empire.\u00a0 An estimated 90% had been killed, deported out of the country, or forcibly converted to Islam.\u00a0 Vast amounts of ink were spilled in the West condemning the Turks, with lofty promises of war crime tribunals for those responsible.\u00a0 No sentences were ever passed.\u00a0 The closest example of justice would come from the assassination of Taalat Pasha in 1921 by an Armenian student in Berlin.\u00a0 The following trial would focus on Taalat’s role in the genocide, bringing to light the extent of the butchery but also hardening relations between the new Turkish Republic and the West.<\/p>\n

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If the Turks believed they had answered the “Armenian Question” once and for all, the surrender of Russia brought the question back to light.\u00a0 Thousands of Armenians had escaped to Russia or Russian-occupied territories.\u00a0 The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had granted the Ottomans key sections of the Russian Caucasus that housed most of those Armenians, but these lands now had their own independence within the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic.\u00a0 The Republic had been an ad hoc Menshevik creation as Tsarist Russia fell and the neither the Provisional Government nor the following Bolsheviks had much political power to exercise.\u00a0 Coupled with Turkey’s ever-encroaching occupation, the locals need form some kind of government to at least negotiate, leading to the Republic’s formation.\u00a0 But the Transcaucasian Republic lacked any real sense of public support or internal unity, and coupled with the total lack of military forces, the best the Republic could do was repeatedly negotiate surrenders of territory to the Ottomans, who then would follow up those treaties with yet a further invasion, staring the process anew.<\/p>\n

The headline from Talaat Pasha’s assassination<\/p><\/div>\n

The Ottoman invasion of eastern Armenia would be the death knell for the short-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic.\u00a0 The group’s Georgian delegation gained German support for independence and left the Republic.\u00a0 In fact, German troops would enter Georgia and in June 1918 would fight alongside their new Georgian allies against the Turks as Germany prized access to oil fields over their Ottoman alliance.\u00a0 Only after suffering casualties at the hands of experienced Germans troops and advisers did the Turks agree, in part, to recognizing Georgia.<\/p>\n

Turkey might have found herself losing the larger war effort and diplomatically isolated from even her allies in their Caucasus campaign, but without some military check on their advances, there was no reason to stop advancing.\u00a0 The Georgians and the Azerbaijanis were willing to submit to peace at any price, especially since most of the Ottoman territorial demands would come at the expense of the Armenians.\u00a0 The Armenians would draw a line in the sand at Sardarabad.<\/p>\n

While the Armenians would field an army only half the size of the Ottomans, the Turks recklessly advanced, either unaware or indifferent to the presence of Armenian artillery.\u00a0 For the most part, the Turks had advanced in Armenia against unorganized, token opposition.\u00a0 Now confronted with a determined enemy, the Turks resorted to making up stories to their commanders about transports sinking in the river to try and explain away their losses.\u00a0 In a nine-day battle, the Turks and their Kurdish allies lost an estimated 3,500 men – a pittance measured against the deaths on other Great War battlefields, but significant enough to halt the Turkish advance and bring them again to the negotiating table.<\/p>\n

Bones scattered the desert – the eastern Syria desert is the final resting spot of likely hundreds of thousands of victims who never received a burial<\/p><\/div>\n

The subsequent Treaty of Batum may have been viewed as overly favorable to the Turks, granting them the gains they had received in eastern Armenia and other economic concessions, but the treaty did recognize the now three independent nations of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.\u00a0 And it meant a chance at survival for the thousands of Armenians who had escaped Turkey’s genocide.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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