Middle East - Anthony Ham [31]
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WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARMENIANS?
The final years of the Ottoman Empire saw human misery on an epic scale, but nothing has proved as enduringly controversial as the fate of the Armenians. For millennia, this large but disparate community had lived in eastern Anatolia, almost always as subjects of some greater state such as the Byzantines, Persians, Seljuks or Ottomans. In the early 20th century, the Orthodox Christian Armenians made the error of siding with the Russians against the Muslim Turk majority. It was an error for which they paid dearly.
The tale begins with eyewitness accounts, in autumn 1915, of Ottoman army units rounding up Armenian populations and marching them towards the Syrian desert. It ends with an Anatolian hinterland virtually devoid of Armenians. What happened in between remains one of the most controversial episodes in the 20th-century Middle East.
The Armenians maintain, somewhat compellingly it must be said, that they were subject to the 20th century’s first orchestrated ‘genocide’. They claim that over a million Armenians were summarily executed or killed on death marches and that Ottoman authorities issued a deportation order with the intention of removing the Armenian presence from Anatolia. To this day, Armenians demand an acknowledgement of this ‘genocide’. Very few Armenians remain in Turkey, although there are significant Armenian communities in Syria, Iran and Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
Less compellingly, although with equal conviction, Turkey refutes any claims that such ‘genocide’ occurred. It does admit that thousands of Armenians died, but claims the Ottoman order had been to ‘relocate’ Armenians with no intention to eradicate them. The deaths, according to Turkish officials, were the result of disease and starvation, direct consequences of the tumultuous state of affairs during a time of war. A few even go so far as to say that it was the Turks who were subjected to ‘genocide’ by the Armenians.
Almost a century after the events, the issue remains contentious. In 2005, President Erdoğan encouraged the creation of a joint Turkish-Armenian commission to investigate the events; Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s most famous novelist and 2006 Nobel Prize Laureate, speaking in Germany, claimed that a million Armenians had been killed and that Turkey should be prepared to discuss it; and academics convened in İstanbul to discuss the issue. All three initiatives failed. Armenia flatly refused Erdoğan’s offer, Pamuk was pursued by the courts for ‘insulting Turkishness’ (the charges were later dropped), and the conference attracted vehement protests from Turkish nationalists.
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COLONIAL MIDDLE EAST
With the exception of Napoleon’s stunning march into Egypt, Britain and France had slowly come to occupy the Middle East less by conquest than by stealth. European advisers, backed by armed reinforcements when necessary, were increasingly charting the region’s future and it would not be long before their efforts were rewarded.
With the outbreak of WWI in 1914, the Ottoman Empire made its last serious (and ultimately fatal) error by throwing its lot in with Germany. Sultan Mohammed V declared a jihad (holy war), calling on Muslims everywhere to rise up against Britain, France and Russia (who were encroaching on Eastern Anatolia). When the British heard the Ottoman call to jihad, they performed a masterstroke – they negotiated an alliance with Hussein bin Ali, the grand sherif (Islamic custodian and descendant of the Prophet Mohammed)