THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Volume 54, Number 8 · May 10, 2007
The Mass Murder They Still Deny
By Michael Oren
A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility
by Taner Akçam, translated from the Turkish by Paul Bessemer
The first reports of massacres reached the USembassy in Istanbulin December 1914. Hundreds of
Armenians, a Christian people with ancient roots in Anatolia, had been murdered
by rioters in the Bitlis region of eastern Turkey
and hanged in the streets of Erzurum.
Countless others had died from exposure and exhaustion while laboring as human
mule-trains for the Turkish army. By the spring of 1915, much of the country’s
Armenian population had -so it was claimed by Armenian spokesmen and American
missionaries and diplomats-been subjected to mass deportations, wholesale
pillage, and rape.
The US ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, initially questioned the veracity of these
accounts. Morgenthau was the latest of a series of American Jews appointed to
that post on the assumption that Jews formed a natural link between the Muslim
Middle East and Christian America. He had come to admire the Armenians as a
people much like his own, with a similar ethnic pride and cultural vigor. He
knew that their position in the Ottoman Empire had grown increasingly tenuous
since the outbreak of war with Russia.
He said he was well aware of the Ottoman penchant for savagery. And yet
Morgenthau still doubted whether the Turks, for all their cruelty, could have
carried out the atrocities ascribed to them. Only when survivors of the horrors
began to stagger into his office, haunted and physically maimed, and the
nightmarish dispatches mounted on his desktop, did the ambassador finally
acknowledge reality. The Turkish government, he informed Washington, had embarked on a policy of
“race extermination” of the Armenians by means of “terrible
tortures, expulsions and… massacres.”
Much like the American officials who, twenty-five years later, were reluctant
to respond to evidence of the Nazi massacres of Jews, Morgenthau was at first
blinded by the enormity of the crime. Who could believe that, in the twentieth
century, political leaders could launch a meticulously planned and exactingly
executed program to annihilate more than a million of their defenseless
neighbors? But unlike his successors at the outset of World War II, none of
whom had clear evidence of what the Germans planned to do to the Jews,
Morgenthau and other diplomats of his generation had recent proof of the mass
killing of Armenians by the Turks. Between 1894 and 1896, Turkish troops
rampaged through Armenian villages, ransacking an estimated one million houses
and killing as many 200,000. “All the Armenians in sight were killed and
their houses and stores robbed,” one American diplomat wrote.
“Another Armenian Holocaust!” exclaimed a New York Times headline in
what may have been the first use of the word to denote genocide. [1]
Allied leaders in the early stages of World War 1 also had access to firsthand
information on the massacres, a source largely denied to their counterparts in
World War 11. Missionaries, many of them American, had been active throughout
the Ottoman Empire for nearly a century,
building Western style schools and hospitals. An extensive consular service had
been established to mediate between these evangelists and the authorities.
Prohibited from proselytizing Muslims, the missionaries concentrated on local
Christians, and especially the Armenians, who were traditionally members of the
Armenian Catholic Church, which was in communion with the Catholic Church in Rome. Significant numbers
of them subsequently converted to Protestantism. Much as Morgenthau likened the
Armenians to the Jews, the missionaries and their consular protectors saw them as hardworking, Westernized
Christians. They were the first to come to the Armenians’ rescue in 1914-1915,
and, along with US diplomats, the first to report in detail on their plight.
From the US consulate in Harput, Leslie Davis wrote, “The Mohammedans in their
fanaticism seemed determined not only to exterminate the Christian population
but to remove all traces of their… civilization.” America’s representative in Aleppo, Syria,
Jesse B. Jackson, observed railway cars crammed with starving Armenian
deportees, few of whom, if any, he expected to survive. From the Persian
frontier, the Presbyterian missionary William Shedd wrote about the execution
of eight hundred villagers, mostly old people and young women, and from the
Caucasus, Reverend Richard Hill reported seeing “children … dying by the
hundreds” whose “frenzied mothers would … fling them … into the
fields, so as not to see their dying agonies.” Other correspondents saw
the inhabitants of entire towns driven into rivers to drown or herded into churches that were then set ablaze.
These grisly descriptions reached not only Allied embassies but also the
general public, through extensive press coverage of the carnage. In May 1915
the Allied Powers issued a declaration protesting these “crimes against
humanity” and vowing to hold Turkey’s leaders “personally
responsible.” A similar process occurred in the United States, though it was still
maintaining its neutrality in the war. In response, the nation’s leading
philanthropists and clergymen, Christians and Jews, joined in creating the
Committee on the Armenian Atrocities, which raised a monumental $100 million
for Near East relief.
The fate of the Armenians also figured prominently in the debates surrounding America’s entry into the conflict against Germany and Austria-Hungary in April 1917. A
large majority of both Houses of Congress demanded a declaration of war against Turkey
as well, in order to rescue the Armenians. “The Armenian massacre was the
greatest crime of the war,” former president Theodore Roosevelt said,
“and failure to act against Turkey is to condone it.” [2]
The United States did not, in the end, make war on Turkey.
The son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers and a close associate of
evangelist groups, President Woodrow Wilson feared that American intervention
in the Middle East would provoke the Turks into massacring the missionaries. Allied forces eventually defeated the Turks
and occupied large segments of Anatolia but never sought justice for those guilty of “crimes against humanity.”
As many as 1.5 million Armenians had been murdered, but outside of the
surviving Armenian community, their memory swiftly faded.
While the attempt to obliterate European Jewry and slaughter Gypsies.
homosexuals, and other “enemies of the [Nazi] state” was almost
universally acknowledged and memorialized by innumerable museums, monuments,
and the field of Holocaust studies, the earlier genocide of Armenians was
generally overlooked. The reasons for this omission were many: the relatively
long time that had elapsed since 1915, for example, and the fact that the
massacres were carried out not in the heart of Europe but in the obscure Middle
East and Central Asia. But the most basic
cause for forgetfulness was the absence of a confession to the crime.
“You’re lucky it was the Germans who killed you,” an Armenian monk in
Jerusalem told writer Yossi Klein Halevi, whose father survived the Holocaust. “They are
a civilized people. They know how to apologize.” [3]
In contrast to Germany, which has publicly and often obsessively accepted
culpability for the Holocaust, paid restitution to its victims, and released
documents attesting to its guilt, the Republic of Turkey has never admitted its
part in the mass murder of Armenians, much less compensated the survivors.
Rather than encourage research on its past butchery, the Turkish government has
promoted publications that exonerate it from any wrongdoing and portray the
Armenians as traitors to the state who allied themselves with Russia and executed thousands of
Turks. In 2003, Turkey’s National Assembly passed a law requiring schools to deny that mass murder had
taken place and it also provided in Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code that
an “insult to Turkishness” was punishable by up to three years in
prison. The law requiring schools to teach genocide denial is indeed different
from Penal Code 301. The latter was used to prosecute Turkish novelist Orhan
Pamuk for telling the Swiss press that “thirty thousand Kurds and a
million Armenians were killed… and nobody dares to talk about it.” The charges
were dropped ten months before he won the Nobel Prize, but the threat of such
prosecution continues, and a number of intellectuals have been convicted under
Article 301.
Increasing numbers of people have been willing to write about the genocide,
though, in Britain and the United States.
Beginning with the reprint, in 1989, of Leslie Davis’s harrowing reports from
the killing fields of Harput, a succession of English-language books
documenting the genocide have appeared. Among them were collections of
contemporary press articles and missionary correspondence as well as the
testimonies of survivors. There followed several surveys of America’s
reaction-or failure to react-to the atrocities, including distinguished works
by Samantha Power, Jay Winter, Merrill Peterson, and Peter Balakian. Vahakn N.
Dadrian provided an Armenian perspective on the massacres and Donald Bloxham
wrote about the diplomacy of the major European powers concerning the killing of
the Ottoman Armenians.[4] All of these studies, however, were mainly about the
Armenians’ suffering and the way the Akçam is hardly new to the Armenian issue or to resistance to the Turkish state. Born in 1953 in Ardahan, a
province in northeastern Turkey whose once-sizable Armenian population was decimated during World War I, Akçam
studied economics at the Middle East Technical University
in Ankara. His interest in the Armenian question, and in Turkish history generally, originated
not in the classroom but as a leader of the leftist-the Turkish government
would say terrorist-Revolutionary Path party. Akçam’s extreme anti-Western,
anti-NATO activities led to his arrest in 1976 and to a ten-year jail sentence,
but he managed to escape to Germany.
At Hamburg’s Institute for Social Research and at the University of Hannover, he began his investigation into Turkey’s
treatment of the Armenians. In 2004 he published a groundbreaking study, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide. His new
book, written under the auspices of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, provides the most comprehensive and
penetrating answers to date about why and how the Turks murdered huge numbers of their countrymen.
Those answers proved to be immensely complex and Akçam is meticulous and fair
in presenting them. Much of his study is devoted to recreating the particular
historical setting in which the Armenian genocide took place. He emphasizes
that the decision to embark on a policy of “race extermination” was
made neither impulsively nor idiosyncratically. Rather, it reflected successive
centuries of Ottoman disappointment, humiliation, and vengefulness.
Lords of one of the vastest empires in human history, stretching from the
Saharan Atlas Mountains to the Persian frontier and from the Black Sea to the
banks of the Danube, the Turkish-speaking Ottomans were a formidable people, adept at both war and administration. Late
medieval and Renaissance Europeans trembled al the mention of the
“terrible Turk” who, as late as 1683, could still lay siege to
Vienna; but from then on the Ottoman Empire suffered a continual political and
military decline, with two voracious empires – the Hapsburg and the Russian – gnawing at its borders.
The deterioration of the Ottoman state had large consequences for the
non-Muslim minorities in the empire, and especially for the Christians.
Starling in 1536, in a treaty between Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and King
François I of France,
the Sublime Porte (Bab-ı Ali in Turkish, the gate of the Grand Vizier’s palace)
conferred extraterritorial privileges on European traders and pilgrims in its
territories. These concessions or “Capitulations” originally applied
only to foreign nationals, but with the weakening of Ottoman power, they served
as vehicles for extending European protection to Ottoman Christians. France and Austria
were accorded the right to defend Roman Catholics residing in the empire and in
1774, after a disastrous defeat of the Ottomans by Russia, Catherine the Great became
the guardian of the far more numerous Orthodox Christians. The Great Powers
exploited their newfound status to broaden their control over Ottoman lands, in
preparation for what they assumed was the empire’s eventual dissolution.
Muslim Ottomans observed these events with feelings of impotence and disgrace.
Conceived as a raiding (ghazi) state whose borders were constantly expanding,
the Ottoman Empire was now ignominiously
shrinking in the face of infidel armies. At the same time, these territorial
retreats were accompanied by the abandonment of the centuries-old
relationship between the sultan’s Muslim and non-Muslim subjects as mandated by
Islamic law. Though defined as dhimmî (protegés) of the state and immune from
forced conversion and seizures of property, non-Muslims-Christians and Jews,
mostly-were relegated to a legally inferior status. They were prohibited from
testifying against Muslims in court, from marrying Muslim women, and from
building new places of worship. During different periods and with varying
severity, dhimmî were required to pay a poll tax (jizya) and to wear
distinctive clothes. At the same time, though, the non-Muslim communities of
the empire-whether in Palestine or Mesopotamia, for example -were formally recognized as
millets and granted far-reaching internal autonomy in personal matters such as
marriage and education. A balance thus existed between the Ottoman authorities
and their non-Muslim wards, a combination, Akçam notes, of “humiliation
and toleration.”
That equilibrium was steadily unsettled, however, and ultimately overthrown by
European intervention. Under the Capitulations, Ottoman Christians not only
achieved equality with Muslims but had a superior status: they paid fewer
taxes, were exempt from military service, and were protected by European
consuls. From the Muslim perspective, the situation deteriorated further in the
1830s with the emergence of the diplomatic and strategic quandary called
“the Eastern Question”-in effect, how to deal with the disintegration
of the Ottoman Empire so as to avoid a war among Europeans over its pieces. One
answer by the Europeans was to demand fundamental reforms of Ottoman law and
administration. Hard-pressed sultans in Constantinople
proceeded to issue a series of Tanzimat, or reorganizations, creating,
outside of the Sharia law, a body of modern jurisprudence that transformed
subjects with disparate rights into full-fledged citizens. For
traditional Muslims who considered the state the agent of divine fiat and its
legal system as inviolate and supreme, the Tanzimat were nothing less than a
cataclysm, an insult to the proper order of the universe. “We have lost
our sacred right that our forefathers won with their blood,” Akçam quotes
one of them protesting, and anger over that loss was increasingly directed at
the Christian beneficiaries of the Tanzimat.
Such rage only grew more intense as the century progressed and as the empire
ceded control of additional provinces to Europe-Egypt,
Algeria, Tunisia, Cyprus, and much of the Balkans.
Ottoman Christians, and the Armenians in particular, came to be seen by the
Muslim majority as a fifth column working to dissolve the empire from within
while the European powers took over its appendages. Antagonism toward
Christians became particularly strong in the aftermath of
the disastrous Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878 and the public request of
the Armenian patriarch to Russia
not to return captured Armenian
areas to Turkish rule. “The Armenians are a degenerate community,”
Sultan Abdul Hamid II, an advocate of pan-Islamism, declared, and his
pronouncement resounded among embittered Muslims. Their pent-up resentment
finally erupted in 1894, when a tax revolt in a remote Armenian village set off
government-condoned pogroms throughout much of the country. “The Turkish
killing of the Armenians is not simply persecution,” the German reformist
Friedrich Nauman commented. “On the contrary, it is part of the
life-and-death struggle of an old and great empire not willing to die without
exerting one last, bloody effort to save itself.”
The same longing to rescue the empire led the Ottomans to embrace religious and
nationalist ideologies that they hoped could stop it from unraveling further.
But whether pan-Islamic or pan-Turkish, these movements excluded the Armenians.
Even the revolution staged by the avowedly secular Young Turks in 1908, and the
ostensibly multiethnic Committee of Union mid Progress they established, failed
to include nun-Muslim leaders on an equitable basis. Nor, as Akçam emphatically
points out, did all Armenians want to be included. The small but obstreperous
Hanchak organization of Armenian nationalists periodically .staged attacks
against Turkish civilians with the goal of provoking violence and prompting
Great Power intercession for its cause. One year after [lie 1908 revolution, in
the Adana region of south-central Turkey, Muslim rioters, inflamed by rumors of
a coup in Istanbul against the new government, murdered at least 15,000
Armenians.
The Adana
massacres exposed the flimsiness of the "Unionist" slogan promoted by
Turkish leaders calling for "unity of peoples." The resurgence of
Turkish-Muslim identity was accelerated by yet another series of Ottoman
defeats in Libya and Bulgaria.
Hundreds of thousands of Balkan Muslims fled into Anatolia
and resettled in Armenian areas. These refugees, Ak4am writes, would soon seek
vengeance for their suffering by attacking their Christian neighbors. They
would also provide an enthusiastic audience for Ziya Gökalp, the ideologue of a
united Turkey who, inspired
by extreme nationalist writings from Germany and Prance, began
preaching the racist concept of pan-Turanism. "Gökalp, according to the
Unionists, would reassert its rule over all ethnically Turkish populations
while ridding itself of "impure" elements. "The enemy's country
shall be laid waste," Gökalp vaunted. "Turkey shall grow into Turan with
haste."
By 1914, the Unionist government was dominated by the militant troika of Mehmet
Telat, Ahmet Çemal, and Enver Paşa, all of them committed to the
"Turkification" of the truncated empire. Entire communities of Greeks
and Armenians were to be "cleansed" - driven out of their homes-by
state-sponsored seizures and terrorism. A "special organization,"
anticipating the Nazi Einsatzgruppen, was secretly established under the aegis
of the police to carry out the purge. "'The transformation of the Islamic
world into one of revolution ... had been in preparation for some time and had
now been put into action," Enver Paşa wrote to officials in Berlin in
August after concluding a clandestine alliance with the Central Powers. Nearly
200,000 Armenians had already been uprooted from the Smyrna
- later Izmir - region, by November 5, 1914, the day that Russia declared war
on Turkey and brought it into World War I.
Still, the program to eliminate the Armenians was not immediately pursued but
progressed step by step over the following six months. Armenian men were first
conscripted into forced labor battalions where most of them eventually died
from starvation and exposure or were shot, many after digging their own graves.
Next, the special organization rounded up and hanged large numbers of Armenian
intellectuals; and it encouraged gangs of released convicts and Balkan refugees
to ravage Armenian towns. Large-scale deportations began in the late spring
following Russian advances in Crimea and the Caucasus
and the British landing at Gallipoli, as battered Turkish troops sought, and
found, Armenian scapegoats for their failures. Akçam cites Enver Paşa writing
his wife, "If I could tell you of the savagery the enemy has inflicted,...
you Would understand the things that enter the heads of poor Muslims." He
assured her that the Turks would soon exact retribution. "Revenge,
revenge, revenge; there is no other word for it."
Most of the slaughter was organized by officials of the national regime,
provincial governors, and the gendarmes. Akçam is at his best in reconstructing
the process through which the decisions were made, usually in secret without
the knowledge of the cabinet or the parliament. Orders were given to bring the
Armenian problem, in Interior Minister Talat's phrase, to "a final end, in
a comprehensive and absolute way." Akçam proves baseless the Turkish
claims that the Armenian casualties were incurred during an Armenian uprising
in the city of Van in eastern Turkey or in the process of relocating
pro-Russian Armenians who lived near the front lines in World War I. Some
55,000 Armenians were massacred in Van before the rebellion while most of the
Armenians deported lived nowhere near the battlefields. On the other hand,
Akçam cites instances in which ordinary Turks, even religious officials, risked
their lives to save Armenians. His book is dedicated to one of them, Haji Halil,
who hid an Armenian family of eight.
Haji Halil, however, was an exception. All but a few Muslims remained silent
throughout the atrocities and some participated in them. In his memoirs, Lewis
Einstein, yet another American Jewish diplomat assigned to the Istanbul
embassy, tells of watching as an elderly Muslim woman borrowed an officer's
pistol and shot a passing Armenian refugee in the head. [5] Unencumbered by
domestic opposition or objections from Turkey’s German and Austrian
allies, Turkish slaughter of the Armenians persisted until the Treaty of
Mudros, signed on October 30, 1918, ended the war in the east.
Akçam devotes the concluding chapters of his book to the immediate aftermath of
the war and the various efforts to prosecute those responsible for the
massacres. Apart from a few dozen arrests and even fewer convictions under the
British, none of these investigations succeeded. Turkish officials destroyed
the evidence of their killing, burning incriminating documents as well their
victims’ bodies. Allied jurists were also stymied by the absence of a precedent
in international law for trying people accused of committing atrocities against
their fellow citizens. Yet even the obstacles posed by the lack of material
proof and legal precedent might have been overcome if political and military
upheavals had not convulsed postwar Turkey and clouded the memory of
its crimes.
Justice for the Armenians was frustrated by discord between the Allied Powers,
particularly Britain and France, whose forces occupied Istanbul after the war. While the British
were intent on pressing charges against Turkish leaders, the French feared that
the trials would incite agitators against the Allies and refused to give any
help to the proceedings. Another impediment was the Turkish parliament, which
was soon mired in debates over who had suffered more acutely in the war,
Christians or Muslims.
The final and ultimately insurmountable hurdle, however, arose in May 1919 with
the Greek invasion of Smyrna,
which resulted in the mass killing and deportation of innumerable Muslims from
the area. Armenians demanded independence in six Anatolian provinces. These
events rallied nationalist forces under the charismatic command of General
Mustapha Kemal. Influenced by his Unionist past and eager to reunite tire lurks
after years of defeat and fractiousness, Kemal – who later adopted the name
Ataturk, “Father Turk” – all but suppressed any further mention of
genocide. The massacres, he claimed, were the work of a small and unauthorized
clique-a “shameful let,” but one for which the Turkish nation bore no
collective responsibility.
The Kemalist armies proved victorious, driving out the Greeks and forcing the
Allies to sue for a treaty. At the Lausanne Conference in 1923, which
established Turkey’s
permanent borders, the Armenian massacres were not even mentioned: nor were the
Armenians allowed to take part (while the claims of the Kurds were
disregarded). The question of the Armenian genocide would remain in abeyance
for more than eighty years, by which time its denial had become a part of
Turkish law and identity. The last of the Armenian witnesses to the crime
reached the age of one hundred, and the memories of emaciated children,
destroyed villages, and mass graves faded.
Some nations nevertheless appear to be taking a new interest in the fate of the
Armenians. Last May, the French National Assembly passed a bill formally
denouncing the Armenian genocide. The law was predictably dismissed by Ankara as a device for denying Turkey’s admission to the European
Union. In fact, prominent French politicians have championed Turkish membership
in the EU and, by enacting the law, the French parliament has created an
example for other European Countries to emulate. France’s
legislation also increased pressure on the United
States and Israel, both of which have Holocaust memorials but which have consistently feared that
they would alienate Turkey if they called attention to the Armenians’ suffering.
There is even some sign, albeit modest, of a change of attitude in Turkey,
where the recent assassination of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink
has forced the country to confront the genocide question. Dink, who had
received death threats for his writing on the massacres and who was appealing
his conviction under Article 301, was gunned down by a radical Turkish
nationalist. His funeral, attended by Armenian intellectuals and church leaders
as well as by senior government officials, served as a rare demonstration of
solidarity and a willingness to reconcile. An estimated 50.000 mourners marched
in the streets of Istanbul. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has even suggested that Article 301
might be revised. But that gesture may have more to do with achieving Turkey’s entry into Europe than it does with truly grappling with Turkey’s past.
Akçam is less concerned with Turkey’s
international standing than he is with freeing his people from their state of
denial. “Only full integration of Turkey’s past [with its historical
record] can set the country on the path to democracy.” he concludes. His
courageous and timely book should be read by students and policymakers
everywhere, not just in Turkey.
In the shadow of Darfur and the Holocaust denial in Tehran,
the lessons of Armenia
should at last be learned.
__________________________________________
1. Henry Morgenthau’s correspondence on the Armenian massacres is available on
microfilm at the Library of Congress. See, for example, Reel 7, Morgenthau to
the Secretary of State, July 16, 1915. See also his memoirs, Ambassador
Morgenthau’s Story (Doubleday, 1918) and The Murder o fa Nation (Armenian
General Benevolent Union of America, 1974). On the first usage of the word
“Holocaust,” see Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian
Genocide and America’s
Response (HarperCollins, 2003), p. 11.
2. Roosevelt to Cleveland Hoadley Dodge, May 11, 1918, in The Letters of
Theodore Roosevelt, Vol. 8, edited by Elting E. Morison (Harvard University
Press, 1954), pp. 1316-1318. On The New York Times’s coverage of the Nazi
genocide, see Laurel Leff, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s
Most Important Newspaper (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
3. Yossi Klein Halevi, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search
for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land
(Morrow, 2001), p. 156.
4. Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse
Province: An American
Diplomat’s Report on the Armenian Genocide, 19151917 (Aristide D. Caratzas,
1989).
Collections of press and missionary correspondence on the atrocities can be
found in Richard Kloian, The Armenian Genocide: News Accounts from the
American Press (Anto, 1988); The Armenian Massacres, 1894 1896: US Media
Testimony, edited by Arman J. Kirakossian (Wayne State University Press, 2004);
and Turkish Atrocities: Statements of American Missionaries on
the Destruction of Christian Communities in Ottoman Turkey, 1915-1977,
edited by
James L. Barton (Gomidas Institute, 1998). The best single volume of survivors’
testimonies is Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral
History of the Armenian Genocide (University of California Press, 1993). On
American policy and attitudes toward the genocide see America and the
Armenian Genocide of 1915, edited by Jay Winter (Cambridge University Press,
2003); Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of
Genocide (Basic Books, 2002); and Merrill D. Peterson, Starving Armenians:
America and the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1930 and After (University of
Virginia Press, 2004). For an Armenian perspective on the massacres, see Vahakn
N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the
Balkans of Anatolia to the Caucasus (Berghahn,
1995). The interaction between Great Power diplomacy and native independence
movements in the Armenian question is discussed in Donald Bloxham’s The Great
Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman
Armenians (Oxford University Press, 2005).
5. Lewis Einstein, Inside Constantinople
(London: John Murray, 1917), p.231
