User:Eperoton/sandbox/Armenian Genocide Quotes

These sources have been excerpted to inform discussion of NPOV issues at Talk:Ottoman Empire

Cambridge History series

Cambridge History of Turkey, Vol. 4

a) Timeline p. xiv: Deportation and massacre of Armenians

b) p. 96: One of the most tragic events of the war was the deportation of much of Anatolia’s Armenian population. On the grounds that the Armenian revolutionary committees were actively aiding the Russian enemy, the Ottoman government decided to deport all Armenians affiliated with the Armenian Apostolic Church from the war zone (on the Caucasian front) to Syria. In practice, many Armenian communities outside thewar zone and many members of the Armenian intellectual and cultural elite were also uprooted. The deportations, accompanied by massacres and carried out with brutality under harsh conditions of climate and hunger, led to massive loss of life and the termination of the Armenian presence in Anatolia.

c) p. 176 footnote: Armenian as well as some Turkish scholars call the consequences of the 1915 Ottoman deportations of most members of the Ottoman Armenian community a ‘genocide’. [...] There are also scholars who contest that a ‘genocide’ occurred and attribute the fate of the Armenians to the politics of the First World War.

New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 5

p. 68: After 1914, as eastern Anatolia became a theatre of war, armies collided, and so did incompatible nationalisms. More catastrophically than anything ever seen in other provinces, the Armenian massacres and deportations (1915) destroyed centuries of coexistence, leaving desolation.

Encyclopedia of Islam

Brill, Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed

a) Arminiya: The calvary of the Armenians in Turkey began with the Erzerum affair (25 February 1890), went through numerous crises, notably in 1895-6 and in 1909 (Adana), and reached its culmination during the First World War, in 1915, during the systematic suppression of the Armenians organised by the government of the Young Turks.

b) ʿOt̲h̲mānli̊: The very unfavourable international development after the revolution, however, brought the Young Turkish rulers to measures that certainly were not originally on the programme, such as the Armenian massacres during the war and the severe government in Syria.

Brill, Encyclopedia of Islam, 3nd ed

a) Erzurum: The Armenian population of the city and its region was largely deported or killed in June 1915 (still a controversial issue, however), somewhat before the Russian capture of the city in February 1916.

b) Circassians, modern: The protracted and disastrous Caucasian War lasted until 21 May 1864, when Russia proclaimed victory. The century-long conflict resulted in the devastation of the Circassian nation and a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Circassians to the Ottoman Empire. Only a few remained in Circassia. This is considered by some scholars as the first attempted genocide in modern history, preceding the Armenian massacres by some fifty years.

OUP encyclopedias

The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World

a) Young Turks: This trend continued during World War I with the massacre and deportation from eastern Anatolia of the Armenians as well as the arrival of Turks from the Caucasus.

b) Ottoman Empire: From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of the First World War, the empire faced a series of nationalist and separatist uprisings, from different ethnic groups, seeking to break up the empire in order to secure their independence. The uprisings of the Christian minorities, supported by Russia and other European Great Powers, who sought to use these movements as vehicles to extend their influence within the Ottoman body politic and, ultimately, to replace Ottoman rule with their own. It started with the Greek revolution early in the century and continued in Serbia and Bulgaria; later in the century, it spread to Macedonia and to the Armenians in Anatolia. The resulting loss of territories and large-scale massacres of Muslim (and in some cases Jewish) subjects by the rebels as well as by the newly independent Christian states of southeastern Europe, aimed at securing homogenous national populations for the new nation-states, led to massacres and countermassacres that characterized the empire, with little break, during the last half century of its existence.

Monographs

Lapidus

In the Ottoman Empire, the implementation of this principle led to a vast and virtually unimaginable rearrangement of the peoples of the Balkans and Anatolia – by transfers and exchanges of populations, deportations and resettlements, massacres and genocide. [...]During World War I, the Armenian population of Anatolia was destroyed in order to create a Turkish space in eastern Anatolia. Armenians in western Anatolia were limited to 5 percent of the total population, and the eastern Anatolian Armenian population was to be reduced by deportation and physical annihilation to between 5 and 10 percent. In the course of deportation vast numbers of people were removed from their villages and towns eastward and southward to Syria, left to die in the desert, attacked by local Kurds and other marauders, and/ or simply massacred. An estimated 1.3 million people were killed. Lapidus, Ira M.. A History of Islamic Societies (p. 532). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition. 2014

Finkel

[T]he government decided on 24 April 1915 to deport the Armenians of eastern Anatolia to Syria and Iraq, well away from the Ottoman–Russian front line. Matters became yet more alarming for the Ottomans when in mid-May a Russian–Armenian army reached Van [...] and on 27 May the government passed the ‘Deportation Law’, whereby the military authorities were authorized to relocate the Armenians around Lake Van and in the province of Van southwards into south-east Anatolia, to break up concentrations of Armenian population considered breeding-grounds for anti-Ottoman rebellion. Government orders included strict instructions on ensuring the safe conduct of the Armenian deportees,28 yet eyewitness reports from foreign consuls, missionaries and soldiers in eastern Anatolia told of terrible suffering as thousands died on the march and thousands more were massacred. [...] That terrible massacres took place on both sides is not in doubt; the devil is in the detail, and only genuinely disinterested historical research will establish whether the deportation and death of the Armenians of Anatolia constituted a genocide or not – if that is what must be determined. No ‘smoking gun’ has been found in the Ottoman archives, but this cannot be taken as evidence that no order was given: documents can be lost perfectly innocently, as well as removed. Some who accept Ottoman culpability suggest that the massacres were ordered by the ‘Special Organization’, a secret society of military men inside the CUP which was started by Enver Pasha and under his control at the start of the war, but its records no longer exist. [...] Ahmed Refik’s testimony would seem to shift the burden of guilt to a clandestine body, but does not thereby necessarily exonerate a government whose relations with the Special Organization remain unclear. Circumstantial evidence does not constitute proof, however, and judgement must await the completion of research: Finkel, Caroline. Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire (p. 534-5). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. (Top recommendation for a general survey from the Oxford Bilbiographies article "Ottoman Empire")

Douglas

The Armenian Genocide. [...] While property seizures and deportations of Ottoman Greeks from northwestern Anatolia were going on, shadowy and loosely organized CUP paramilitary groups, now formally constituted as the “Special Organization” (Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa), also started evicting and killing Armenians in eastern Anatolia and confiscating their property. [...] On 24 April 1915 orders went out from Istanbul for the closure of Armenian committees and the arrest of their leaders, 125 confiscation of their records, and “gathering the Armenians whose existence in their present places is regarded as dangerous in secure places in provinces and sub-provinces without leaving any room for them to escape.” 126 In fact deportations had already commenced from Cilicia in early April, in the face of an anticipated British synchronized landing with Greek forces at İskenderun. 127 Mass deportations were carried out all over the upper Tigris– Euphrates, without regard for actual involvement in revolutionary activity or combat against the Ottoman army. Armenian men, women, and children were rounded up and marched in columns from their towns and villages, sent into exile without provisions for survival. Huge camps formed at Aleppo, the center of the process, at other Syrian cities, and at Deyr al-Zor and several other locations along the Euphrates in the Syrian desert. In these camps there were mass murders, expropriations and pillaging, and forced conversions. 128 Thousands of the deported victims, moreover, never reached the camps. Many died of hunger, thirst, and exhaustion. Frequently the columns were set upon and plundered by bands of Turks and Kurds, with mass killings. The deportation from Erzurum became an “orgy of murder, rape, mutilation, kidnap, and theft.” Howard, Douglas A.. A History of the Ottoman Empire (Kindle Locations 11026-11073). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition. 2017

Hanioğlu

One of the most tragic events of the war was the deportation of much of the Armenian population of Anatolia. Faced with the prospect of total collapse on the Ottoman eastern front early in the war the government apparently decided to deport all Armenians of the Armenian Apostolic Church living in and around the Ottoman-Russian war zone, on the grounds that the Armenian revolutionary committees were rebelling against the Ottoman Empire and providing crucial assistance to the advancing Russian armies.59 However, the finer details of this decision were abandoned in practice with the result that almost all Armenian populations affiliated with the Apostolic Church were deported, [...] The deportation of the Armenians (mainly to Dayr al-Zawr in Syria) was carried out with largescale violence and under conditions of extreme weather and hunger, leading to massive loss of life. It effectively ended Armenian existence in much of Anatolia. p. 182. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire By M. Şükrü Hanioğlu. Princeton University Press. 2010

Quataert

Excerpt from The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922 by Donald Quataert. Cambridge University Press, 2005: [1]