Historiography of the Armenian Genocide

Armenian population in Eastern Anatolia (1896)

The Historiography of the Armenian Genocide is the study of how historians have constructed narratives detailing the causes and outcomes of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. That the events constituted a genocide is recognized by a vast majority of historians and scholars,^[1] but other issues surrounding the genocide continue to be debated.

Historians of different backgrounds provide different historiographical interpretations of the genocide. Initial Armenian historians largely consist of those who lived through the massacres of 1915, and later historians of the Armenian diaspora have contributed greatly to western academic understanding of the genocide.^[2][3] Turkish nationalist interpretations of the event tend to deny the genocide and downplay the experiences of the Anatolian Armenians as part of a broader narrative of Turkish superiority.^[4] Meanwhile, liberal Turkish authors reject this narrative and instead place emphasis on the genocide as being a product of a broader cultural context in the later years of the Ottoman Empire, particularly focusing on the ideas of Armenian nationalism, economic forces and migration patterns.^[5]

Armenian Historiography[edit]

Armenian Historian Vahakn Dadrian

The first sources dealing with the genocide were the first-hand accounts written by the Armenians who lived through it. These sources were long overlooked by academic historians due to the belief that, as part of the victim group, they would be accused of lacking objectivity. Armenian accounts of the genocide also appear in the history books of the Armenian diaspora during the Cold War.^[2]

The historian Gwynne Dyer has criticised much Armenian historiography of this early era and states that the Soviet Armenian historians E. K. Sarkisian and R. G. Sahakian propagandise too much within their work.^[6] In her book Smyrna 1922, Marjorie Housepian Dobkin states that the massacres of Armenians in Izmir by Turkish soldiers was a deliberate policy set out by the nationalist Turkish government. However, Dyer also criticises this work, stating that Housepian does not adequately support this claim. Rather, he believes that there was no distinct policy for the massacre of Armenians, but rather this emerged from the loose control the Turks had over their soldiers.^[7]

A recent Armenian historian of note is Vahakn Dadrian, an Armenian-American. Dadrian argues that the events of 1915 were merely an extension of attitudes, which included violence, of the Turkish majority in the Ottoman Empire toward the Armenians in the decades prior. However, this view is challenged by the French-Armenian historian Raymond Kévorkian. Rather, Kévorkian argues that the 1915 genocide emerged from the goal of the Committee of Union and Progress to create a Turkish nation state after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution.^[8]

Nationalist Interpretation[edit]

The nationalist interpretation of the genocide has emerged from the overarching historiographical narrative established with the proclamation of the Turkish Republic by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923.^[9] Proponents of this historiographical school express the moral superiority of the Turks over the minorities in the Ottoman Empire. On the opposite side, the minorities of the Empire, which included Armenians, were portrayed as lacking morals and therefore provided legitimacy to the actions of the Ottoman government in undertaking the genocide. Further, nationalist historiography tends to downplay the suffering of minorities during the World War One period, during which the genocide occurred, and instead focuses on the suffering of ethnic Turks in the empire whilst fighting in the war.^[4]

The Turkish historian Salahî R. Sonyel writes that the massacres of 1915 were a justified response of the Ottoman state to an Armenian uprising:

A French investigation carried out in 1920 came to the conclusion that the Turkish people and soldiers behaved generally in a correct way towards the deported [Armenians], but that some 500,000 perished as a result of their armed rebellion against the Ottoman state, of the war in which they took part, of privation caused by the war in primitive regions, of sickness, exhaustion following long marches, immediate changes of climate, and of attacks by marauders upon rich convoys . . . The Turks are estimated to have lost over 1,000,000 people owing to similar causes.^[10]

Turkish Liberal Interpretation[edit]

Important considerations taken into account in the construction of the narrative of Turkish liberal historians are the reformation of the Ottoman Empire into the Turkish republic, the economic disparity between Armenians and Turks and the nationalism that emerged from this, the immigration of Muslims from outside the Empire into areas primarily populated by Armenians, and the oppression of Armenians in the second half of the nineteenth century.^[5] Liberal historiography puts emphasis on causal chains in between these events, and can risk failing to address the wider context of the genocide due to a desire to avoid minimising the scale of the event. This is elucidated by the Turkish historian Fatma Müge Göçek:

If I contextualize the massacres of 1915 in my historiography, as I have, within a long Turkish nationalist period that ends up normalizing 1915 and thereby, by implication, mitigating and obliterating the trauma associated with 1915, then I need to critically discuss the location of 1915 in and itself to address this possibility. For I am doubly implicated, not only as a scholar but also as a Turk. It is therefore particularly imperative for me to acknowledge that I as a Turkish scholar convey the critical stand I take in relation to 1915 in the historical narrative I construct.^[11]

Fatma Müge Göçek, along with Ronald Grigor Suny and Gerard Libaridian, led the Workshop for Armenian/Turkish Scholarship (WATS), founded in 2000. The group has been part of a larger movement within Turkey to view the Armenian genocide with more nuance and overcome official Turkish historiography. In 2011, the group was responsible for the publication of a collection of essays entitled A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire which analyses the socio-political context of the Ottoman state before, during and after the genocide. Turkish historian Fuat Dündar argues that the CUP pursued a deliberate policy of displacing Armenians in order to create an easier population to govern. This view is supported by Uğur Ümit Üngör, a Turkish-Dutch historian, who states that the deportations of Armenians was undertaken by the CUP with the goal of economy building and increasing control over the minority populations in Eastern Anatolia.^[12] Üngör also argues that the policies of enforced homogenisation of minority groups in eastern Anatolia were continued by the Republican People's Party up until 1950.^[13]

The Turkish historian Sükrü Hanioğlu has analysed the relationship between the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (also known as the Dashnaktsutiun) and the Young Turks political parties. In this investigation, Hanioğlu states that, in opposition to official Turkish historiography, that the two parties had, to an extent, cooperated to overthrow the sultan Abdul Hamid II and reinstate the 1876 Ottoman Constitution. In contrast, official Turkish historiography describes the Armenian party as working toward the establishment of an independent Armenia, while in his work Hanioğlu expresses that the Turks and Armenians worked together toward the same goal. However, Hanioğlu also expresses that the relationship between these two groups deteriorated due to the Armenians favouring a decentralised kingdom, while the Young Turks desired more centralisation, which resulted in the formation of the Committee of Union and Progress. Therefore, Hanioğlu writes, in the post-revolutionary period, the CUP lost its need for cooperation with the Dashnaktsutiun and it was in this period that the hostilities which led to the genocide emerged.^[14]

Another interpretation presented by liberal historians is that the relations between the Turkish and Armenian political parties did not begin to break down until the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. Amongst the advocates for this interpretation is Taner Akçam. He states that the CUP began to see a homogenous Turkish state as an ideal in the wake of numerous territorial losses within this time period. He says that this was also done in response to Armenian pressure for reform, and the worry that the empire would collapse as result.^[15] Akçam, like the aforementioned members of WATS, also believes that the genocide was a deliberate policy undertaken by the CUP. Supporting this conclusion, he points to the desire of the CUP to reduce the percentage of the Armenian population in any given area to no more than 10%. This could not occur, he states, without large scale massacres and deportations.^[12]

Historiography in the West[edit]

The interpretations of the genocide in the West have been prominently shaped by the work of Armenian historians, such as Vahakn Dadrian, particularly his 1995 work The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus. In this work, Dadrian explains that the genocide emerged from religious tensions in the Ottoman Empire, between the Islamic Turks and the Christian Armenians, and the threads of nationalism which came from this.^[3]

Some historians in the West have argued that the genocide was a result of a desire for the Ottoman Empire to modernise rather than as a product of religious and demographic tensions in the late nineteenth century. One proponent of this narrative is Ronald Grigor Suny, who argues that the genocide originated as a suppression of Armenians who came to be characterised as "a deadly threat to the empire". Then, during the struggles of the First World War, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) embarked on a series of mass killings of Armenians.^[16]

In his 2005 work, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians, Donald Bloxham, a British historian, argues against the idea of the genocide being premeditated. Rather, he states that the nationalist policies of the CUP were radicalised during the First World War, which led to the genocide.^[17] Bloxham's work, however, has been criticised for the sources used, particularly due to his method lacking a systematic approach to the use of Armenian and Turkish sources.^[18]

Hilmar Kaiser, a German-American historian, in his book The Extermination of Armenians in the Diarbekir Region, states that the genocide was not governed by an overall predetermined policy initiated by the CUP. Rather, it was often undertaken at a local level, with the specific methods used being left largely unplanned. He reaches this conclusion through the consultation of correspondence between provincial and national authorities.^[13]

One contentious issue put forward by historians in the west is the narrative that the genocide was only triggered by the First World War, rather than being as a result of a history of anti-Armenian policies. The American historian Stanford Shaw is a proponent of this view and believes that the blame for the genocide should be placed on the Armenians themselves. He states that the massacres were in direct response to the Armenian revolts, for example the Van revolt, which occurred at the same time as the war. Justin McCarthy, and American historian, has also contributed to this interpretation. In his work, he examines the Van uprising and comes to the conclusion that the uprising was the culmination of years of ineffective countermeasures to Armenian Revolutionary activity by the Ottoman state. McCarthy also states that the Armenians committed atrocities against the Turkish Muslim population. He therefore concludes, like Shaw, that the Armenian revolters were to blame for the eventual massacres.^[19]

With the turn of the millennium, the historiography concerning the Armenian genocide has become much more in depth. A facilitator of this is the non-profit organisation Houshamadyan. Founded in Berlin, this organisation aims to depict Armenian life which was lost during the genocide. The organisation's website provides a view into the stories and lives of Armenians who lived under Ottoman rule in Eastern Anatolia. In the context of genocide historiography, this contributes to providing a more detailed understanding of the context of the genocide and encourages historians to overcome political sensitivities surrounding the genocide.^[20]

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