Genocide

Coining of the term

The word “genocide” was first coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule. It consists of the Greek prefix ‘genos,’ meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix ‘cide,’ meaning killing.

Lemkin developed the term in response to the instances in history of targeted actions aimed at the destruction of particular groups of people. He said,

“I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians, and after the Armenians, Hitler took action.”

He also led the campaign to have genocide recognized and codified as an international crime. Genocide was first recognized as a crime under international law in 1946 by the United Nations General Assembly.  (UN on Genocide prevention..,n.d.).

He also led the campaign to have genocide recognized and codified as an international crime. Genocide was first recognized as a crime under international law in 1946 by the United Nations General Assembly.  (UN on Genocide prevention..,n.d.).

Definition

There are different Articles related to genocide in the declaration made by the General Assembly of the United Nations. Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a definition of the crime of genocide

Article I

Genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.

Article II

It includes two main elements:

  • A mental element: the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”; and
  • A physical element, which includes the following five acts:
    • Killing members of the group
    • Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
    • Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
    • Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
    • Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

Article III

The following acts shall be punishable:

(a) Genocide;

(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;

(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide

(d) Attempt to commit genocide;

(e) Complicity in genocide.

Article IV

Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.

The intent

The intent to target and destroy a particular group is what constitutes genocide. And intent is the most difficult element to determine and prove. Also, the victims of genocide are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups, national, ethnical, racial or religious. So, the target is the group and not the individual members. Genocide can also be committed against only a part of the group, as long as that part is identifiable (including within a geographically limited area) (UN Genocide..,n.d.).

Controversy surrounding Armenian genocide

UN definition of genocide says that there has to be an intent and the killings have to systematic to constitute a genocide, Turkey (the then Ottoman Empire) says that the casualties were deaths that occurred during the World War I, rather than the result of any systematic intended killing of the Armenian Christians so it is not a genocide.

Is Armenian mass killing a genocide?

Facts:

  • The Armenians were Christian minority in the Ottoman Empire and were not given proper rights. But they were wealthier and more educated than most of the Turks and Turks saw them with dissent.
  • The Ottoman Empire had entered World War I as an ally of Germany and was fighting against the longtime enemy, Russia. Armenians sided with Russians. The Ottoman Empire suffered a heavy defeat at the hand of Russians. This incident added fuel to the fire and gave Turks a chance to see Armenians as traitors and not worthy of living in the Ottoman Empire.
  • After that, the Ottoman government started the deportation process of all Armenians from Anatolia (now Istanbul) to what is now Syria.
  • During the deportation process, the Armenians were made to march through deserts, stripped of clothes and without any food and water. Many died due to starvation and harsh weather. This was all done on the government’s orders. Women and children who survived in greater numbers endured abductions and rape.

Raphael Lemkin
  • Raphael Lemkin, when he coined the term genocide in 1944, cited the Turkish extermination of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the Jews as defining examples of what he had in mind when he coined the term genocide.
  • The killings of the Armenians as genocide is defined by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
  • Newspapers covered the incident as it was happening for example The New York Times headline from Aug. 18, 1915, said, “Armenians Are Sent to Perish in Desert.” A headline from December read, “Million Armenians Killed or in Exile,” (Arango, 2015).

How does it classify as a Genocide?

Stage 1: Classification

In the Armenian genocide, there was two sets of classification, the Turks (Muslims) and Armenians (Christians).

Stage 2: Symbolization

The Armenians were called ‘traitors’ and ‘unbelievers’ by the Turks. They were considered second class citizens because of their faith.

Classification and symbolization are universally human and do not necessarily result in genocide unless they lead to the next stage, dehumanization (Stanton, 1998).

Stage 3: Dehumanization

The Armenians were dehumanized; deported, arrested and killed. They were forced to march through the Syrian desert where they died of thirst and hunger.

Stage 4: Organization

The Armenian genocide was organized by the Central Committee of the Young Turks. They also created ‘Butchered Battalion’ which was made of convicts released from prisons and were organized to form killer units.

Stage 5: Polarization

Extremists propagate polarizing propaganda. The Armenians were accused of propaganda which included siding with Russians, plan of overthrowing Istanbul. Russia was the enemy of Ottoman Empire in World War I (Stanton, 1998).

Stage 6: Preparation

Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity. They are often segregated into ghettoes or deported into concentration camps (Stanton, 1998).

The Turks confiscated the property of the Turks. The Armenian soldiers were disarmed and were forced to march through the desert.

Stage 7: Extermination

When it is sponsored by the state, the armed forces often work with militias to do the killings. The Armenians were made to march through the desert, men were made to dig their own graves and then killed and entire villages were burned down.

Stage 8: Denial

It is among the surest indicators of a genocide. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes and continue to govern until driven from power by force or forced to flee. The Turks did dig up mass graves and the three Pashas who orchestrated the Armenian genocide fled the Ottoman Empire. The Turkish government still denies that the genocide ever happened (Stanton, 1998).

Scholars point of view:

  • 126 leading scholars of the Holocaust including Elie Wiesel and Yehuda Bauer placed a statement in the New York Times in June 2000 declaring the “incontestable fact of the Armenian Genocide” and urging western democracies to acknowledge it (International Association of Genocide Scholars, 2005).
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
  • A letter written to the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan by the international association of the scholars said that the Armenian Genocide was documented by thousands of official records of the United States and nations around the world including Turkey’s wartime allies Germany, Austria and Hungary, by Ottoman court-martial records, by eyewitness accounts of missionaries and diplomats and by the testimony of survivors. The letter was written to urge the democratic countries to acknowledge the genocide (International Association of Genocide Scholars, 2005).
  • According to David Simon, a professor of political science at Yale University and co-director of its Genocide Studies Program, there is a consensus among genocide scholars that Armenian genocide was a genocide (Ziv, 2015).
  • Armen T. Marsoobian, a professor of philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University who teaches courses in comparative genocide and Bert Patenaude, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and a lecturer in history and international relations at the university, have similar views (Ziv, 2015).

Witnesses Accounts

Henry Morgenthau
  • Foreign diplomats also observed and documented the mass killings. Henry Morgenthau, the US ambassador to Turkey, cabled Washington in July 1915 to say that the brutal killings of Armenians is in progress (Waal, 2015).

Jesse Jackson
  • Jesse Jackson, the US consul in Aleppo, saw the deportees arriving in the desert. He sent a cable to Washington that described mass graves holding nearly 60,000 people (Waal, 2015).

The Other Side                                                        

  • Only 29 countries currently acknowledge that Armenians’ massacre was a suicide and the list does not include the major powers, US, UK and Israel.

Obama promised during his presidential campaign that he would use the word “genocide” if elected but did not fulfil it. In 2010, he said that 1.5 million Armenians were massacred but did not use the word. United States even served as the main frontier for the denial of genocide.  In one book published in 1990, the author, Heath Lowry, the head of the newly established Institute of Turkish Studies in Washington, D.C. casted doubt on the authenticity of Westerners’ eyewitness testimonies. He alleged that Henry Morgenthau was an unreliable witness. Others argued that U.S. missionaries were untrustworthy sources because of their anti-Muslim bias (Waal, 2015).

  • Turkish government focuses on the accounts that Armenians were not the only people to face persecution in eastern Turkey. The Kurdish and Turkish populations, too, at the hands of the Russian army in the World War I (Waal, 2015).
  • As Turkey’s official line is not to call it a genocide, deviation from that can have serious consequences. People who deviate are prosecuted under Turkish Penal Code 301, which makes it a crime to insult “Turkishness.” In the past, the code has been used against those who refer to the events of 1915 as genocide (Ziv, 2015).

Analysis

The arguments of Turkish government are not consistent with the historical evidence. There is a considerable physical evidence, including mass graves, witnesses accounts, survivors’ stories, that large-scale murders did take place. Newspapers, including New York Times, covered the story as it was happening. The evidence overwhelming points that the large-scale slaughter of Armenians from 1915-1916 was a genocide. And even though the Muslims greatly suffered in World War I, the crimes against them were not organized unlike Armenians.

The reasons for certain countries to not call it a genocide are political, and they do not want to ruin their relations with Turkey. Turkey is a key NATO ally. During the Cold War, it was an ally against the Soviet Union (Ziv, 2015). Currently, United States wants Turkey’s cooperation from in the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria (Arango, 2015).

 Even Many Turkish intellectuals now use the term. Among them is the journalist Hasan Cemal, grandson of Ahmed Cemal Pasha, one of the three Young Turkish leaders who ran the brutal Ottoman government in 1915 (Waal, 2015).

Several of the Turkish officials who had been part of the Armenian genocide went on to find the modern Turkey. Those Turkish officials became heroes of modern Turkey, so it is hard for Turkey even today to admit that it was genocide because it would mean ruining the reputations of the founding members of the Turkey.  As Turkish historian Taner Akcam said,

“It’s not easy for a nation to call its founding fathers murderers and thieves,”

(Arango, 2015).

Reference

Waal, d, T. (2015). The G-Word. Foreign Affairs. Retrieved from https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/g-word

Taub, A. (2015). Why it’s so controversial to call the Armenian genocide a genocide. Vox. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/2015/4/22/8465257/armenian-genocide

International Association of Genocide Scholars. (2005). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20060416082159/http://www.genocidewatch.org/TurkishPMIAGSOpenLetterreArmenia6-13-05.htm

Arang, T. (2015). 100 years later, a genocide haunts the Armenian psyche. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/world/europe/turkeys-century-of-denial-about-an-armenian-genocide.html

Ziv, S. (2015). Why Scholars say Armenian genocide was a genocide, but Obama won’t. Newsweek. Retrieved from https://www.newsweek.com/why-scholars-say-armenian-genocide-was-genocide-obama-wont-325262

Genocide prevention and the responsibility to protect. (n.d.). UN. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/index.html

Stanton, H. G. (1998). The 8 Stages of Genocide. Genocide Watch. Retrieved from http://www.genocidewatch.org/genocide/8stagesofgenocide.html