1001 Masks of Turkish Ittihadism in a Century: From Armenian Genocide to Neo-Ittihadism

By Jude Seleck

In the early 1900s, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) committed the Armenian Genocide as part of their pursuit of Pan-Turkist and Pan-Islamist aspirations known as "ittihadism." The CUP also sought to Turkify non-Muslim property, reminiscent of the Aryanization program in Nazi Germany that targeted Jewish assets. The ittihadist dream was shattered when the Ottoman Empire collapsed following their defeat in the Great War.

Established in 1923 as an ittihadist project, the Republic of Turkey adopted "ittihadism" as its fundamental ideology as well. The desire to reach Central Asia and unite with other Turkic nations was initially reignited during World War II. Nonetheless, the dream was once again crushed when Nazi Germany was defeated on the Eastern Front. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought back the aspiration once more.

This book provides an in-depth examination of the major events in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey over a century, placing particular emphasis on the Armenian Genocide, the ongoing Cyprus dilemma, and the Kurdish minority issue. By unraveling the reasoning behind these events, the book provides insight into the worldview of the current Turkish government, led by President Erdoğan and his AK Party, and the transformation of "ittihadism" into "neo-ittihadism" under their leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350940879

Book preview

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1001 Masks of Turkish Ittihadism in a Century:

From Armenian Genocide to Neo-Ittihadism

©Jude Seleck

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 979-8-35094-086-2

eBook ISBN: 979-8-35094-087-9

About the Author

Jude E. Seleck is a Turkish American born and raised in Turkey. He holds master’s degrees in aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics from North Carolina State University and the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree in business sdministration from Boğaziçi University. He is an independent researcher with a deep passion for history, global affairs, and political science.

To Lilit and Julian...

Table of Contents

About the Author

Introduction

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Part 1: OTTOMAN EMPIRE:THE COMMITTEE OF UNION AND PROGRESS (CUP) AND THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Chapter 1: The Great Crime

Chapter 2: The Rise of the CUP to Power

Chapter 3: The Dark Triad

Chapter 4: Turkish World From Adriatic Sea to the Great Wall

Chapter 5: Bells of the War

Chapter 6: Deportations: The Moving Concentration Camps

Chapter 7: After the War

Chapter 8: Archives

Chapter 9: The Devil is in the Details

Chapter 10: The National Economic Policy: Plunder Economy

Chapter 11: The Turkish War of Independence

Chapter 12: The Denial of the Armenian Genocide

Chapter 13: In Lieu of Conclusion: There are no

Two Sides of Genocide

Part 2: REPUBLIC OF TURKEY:FROM ITTIHADISM TO NEO-ITTIHADISM

Chapter 1: Ittihadism in the Early Years of the Republic of Turkey

Chapter 2: Anti-Semitism and 1934 Thrace Pogrom

Chapter 3: Stateless Nation of Kurds I

Chapter 4: Flirt Between Turkey and Nazi Germany During WWII

Chapter 5: 1955 Istanbul Pogrom and 1964 Greek Deportation

Chapter 6: 1974 Invasion of Cyprus: A Pyrrhic Victory

Chapter 7: Stateless Nation of Kurds II

Chapter 8: Westernization Movement Myth

Chapter 9: The AK Party: The Rise of Neo-Ittihadism

Chapter 10: In Lieu of Conclusion II

Selected Bibliography

Index

INTRODUCTION

Jude E. Seleck

It was the 1970s when we embarked on a family trip along the Aegean Sea coast of Turkey, and during that time, we stayed for a few days on a small island off the coast of Ayvalık (Romanized Greek: Kydonies). The island, currently known as Cunda or Alibey (Romanized Greek: Moschonisia), featured traditional narrow cobbled alleys and stone buildings adorned with clay roof tiles and olive groves, exemplifying the typical traits of Greek islands. We stayed in an unsightly concrete hotel, potentially erected in the 1960s or 1970s, creating a stark contrast to the island’s architecture and landscape. As I aimlessly roamed the town, my attention was caught by the sight of a crumbling, whitewashed church. The door was tightly secured by a chain and a clutter of trash filled the interior. I was captivated by the church’s architecture, so I would frequently climb the hotel’s stairs to the roof and admire this exquisite building on the island. I couldn’t grasp why the church wasn’t renovated or why people who once visited it were no longer on the island. Despite my young age of 12 or 13, I had an intuition that something was off. It was only after many years that I discovered the tragic fate of the islanders. Thousands of Greeks, including the church bishop Ambrosios Pleiathidis, were ruthlessly slaughtered by the Turkish army in September 1922 during the Turkish War of Independence.

On October 9, 2001, I queued up to apply for a visa for a business visit at the Istanbul consular office of an East European country, which later became a member of the European Union. At the entrance of the building, a chubby and tall Turkish security guard was attempting to engage in conversation with the young women waiting in the slowly moving queue. He was using sassy language, but his behavior appeared foolish. Despite the little power vested in him, the man behaved as if he was an important person. One moment, he began cracking jokes at a high volume with the Turkish police officers guarding the embassy from the exterior of the building. Turkey is plagued with grandiosity, besides widespread inequality and poverty. His behavior is perfectly normal by the local standards, although completely unprofessional. Hence, the others in the queue wore broad smiles while watching this person as a sign of approval. From my perspective, as someone who had fully embraced Western discipline, the occurrence was so outlandish that I instinctively looked at him and then at the security personnel in disbelief. Even though I said nothing, the security guard must have noticed my actions that contrasted with the others, and he felt the need to furnish an explanation:

"I serviced in the [Turkish] military together with them. I was a specialist corporal in Southeastern [Anatolia]."¹

Then continued:

"On the stock of my rifle, there were... [a number between 100 and 200, which the author can not remember] notches. Do you know what that meant?"

Finally, I felt the need to say something:

"Kill notches? The number of Kurdish guerrillas you have killed?"

He continued very calmly:

"Not just them. One day, we crossed the border towards the Iraqi side and set up an ambush. A passenger bus carrying the villagers was coming. We attacked with mortars. It caught fire instantly, and we blazed away at those who tried to get out with machine guns. Children, women...they were all dead."

I was not expecting that much disclosure, thus I asked him in dismay:

"Were they Kurdish villagers?"

The guard responded with indifference:

"Kurd or Arab. It does not matter. [They are] all the same."

I was speechless, dumbfounded, and at a loss for words. I examined the other people in the queue, but there was no sign of emotion. The inaction evidenced that his declaration was ordinary in this country. The sticky man, apparently not able to engage me in a pleasurable conversation, instantly encountered someone else he could have a more vibrant discussion with.

The guard’s revelation left me perplexed but also awakened me. Despite being skeptical of Turkey’s political views due to its abysmal human rights record, I realized my knowledge of Turkish history was limited. Hence, I delved deeper into Turkish history through independent research and realized that the history taught in Turkey is riddled with falsehoods. This book is a result of years of diligent research.

When studying the Ottoman Empire period, it’s important to recognize that the terms Ottoman and Turk were intentionally used interchangeably. This is certainly not due to any prejudice but for the sake of historical consistency. However, some historians, such as Donald Quataert oppose this and claim that the terms Turk or Turkish are different from Ottoman.² He further asserts that modern-day Turkey is not responsible for the malicious acts of the Ottoman Empire.³ However, although the Ottoman Empire was a multinational state in theory, the administration, and military were under the control of Turks, including the Turkicized subjects. In the second half of the 19th century, there were occasional appointments of predominantly Muslim, non-Turkish, and fewer non-Muslim minorities to some governmental positions. Nevertheless, the Sunni Muslim Turkish majority maintained authority over the administration and the military.⁴ Although the Republic of Turkey, as a nation-state, is the successor of the Ottoman Empire, this does not apply to other ethnic/religious communities who lived under Ottoman rule. For instance, Arab countries, although predominantly Muslim, are not the successor states of the Ottoman Empire, which is also true for other ethnic groups. In Turkey, the Ottoman Empire is viewed as a significant part of its history and is taught as such in the education system. This is similar to how the Republic of Russia is considered the successor to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), with the Russians being the dominant ethnic group within the multi-ethnic USSR, and the USSR being seen as essentially a Russian Empire.⁵

Although not a historian, the author is a devoted student of history. The author recognizes that to conduct a thorough political analysis, one must possess a strong grasp of historical events and a comprehensive understanding of relevant cultures.

Toponym, Person Names, Turkish Language

The book was written with historical sensitivity, taking great care to use the toponyms as they were used during the time period of the events as much as possible.⁶ The current version of a toponym has been indicated in parentheses when it is first introduced. An example of this is Constantinople (Istanbul) during the Ottoman Empire. Only Istanbul was used during the Turkish Republic period, as it is today’s widely accepted form. However, the smaller settlements pose a challenge. The Turkicization of the toponyms policy, which began with the rise of the Committe of Union and Progress (CUP) (Ottoman Turkish: İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti) to power and continued until the 1980s under the Republic of Turkey, caused many smaller settlements and geographical features to be renamed in Turkish. This conversion affected tens of thousands of places that originally had names in indigenous languages such as Greek, Armenian, Arabic, Kurdish, Georgian, Syriac, and Laz, which were commonly used in Anatolia.⁷ Furthermore, as a result of the massacres, forced deportations, and the destruction of significant landmarks like places of worship, schools, and cemeteries, which began under the military dictatorship of the CUP and persisted during the Turkish Republic, the majority of the original residents were displaced, resulting in the loss of their cultural identity and the settlements becoming predominantly Turkish. Thus, all their ties with the past had been deliberately severed. Today, even among historians, there is no consensus on the original names of many settlements. Undoubtedly, there is also a cultural genocide or ethnocide dimension on top of the physical genocide of the events.

It is noteworthy to highlight how the book states the names of Turkish historical figures. The Surname Law in the Republic of Turkey was adopted on June 21, 1934, requiring citizens to adopt a last name. On November 6, 1934, all nicknames and titles were officially abolished. Until then, nicknames and titles such as Effendi (Turkish: Efendi), Bey, Aga (Turkish: Ağa), Khanum (Turkish: Hanım), and Pasha (Turkish: Paşa) were used instead of last names. In the book’s passages devoted to the Ottoman Empire, the names of Turks were written with their nicknames and titles, and the last names they later adopted were also noted in parentheses, e.g., Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk). In the second part of the book about the Turkish Republic, the newly adopted last names, instead of the outlawed nicknames or titles, were used, such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk or simply Atatürk.

Just as the names of the people had to be written in two different formats depending on the period, the words and terms were also written either in Ottoman Turkish or modern Turkish, depending on the era. The disparity between the two is quite large. From the outset of the language reform in the 1930s to its conclusion in the early 1980s, beyond the rules of grammar, numerous Arabic and Persian words found in Ottoman Turkish were replaced with Turkish counterparts out of ideological choice rather than necessity. Most of the modern words added to the language either were already forgotten for centuries or were simply derived from Turkish roots.⁸ That explains why today’s young Turkish generations are almost totally unfamiliar with Ottoman Turkish. Likewise, academics working on Ottoman archives need years of education to decipher the Ottoman Turkish used in the documents.

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1 Since the 1980s, Turkish governments have sought to strengthen the professional army system in the southeast of Turkey in order to combat the Kurdish guerrilla movement by recruiting specialist corporals/sergeants from those who have fulfilled their mandatory military service.

2 Donald Quataert wrote "...Fisk proceeds as if the Ottoman Empire scarcely existed; he almost always - anachronistically- substitutes Turk or Turkish for the historically accurate term Ottoman and ... in two consecutive sentences, he wavers from ‘the Ottoman Army’ to ‘the Turkish Armies’... in Donald Quataert, Review of the Massacres of Ottoman Armenians and the Writing of Ottoman History, by Donald Bloxham," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37, no. 2 (2006): 254-255.

3 Quataert, 255.

4 See; Saro Dadyan, Osmanlı Hariciye Nezaretinde Ermeniler, 2022. https://turksandarmenians.marmara.edu.tr/tr/osmanli-hariciye-nezaretinde-ermeniler/.

5 Russian president Putin in an interview to Russian TV channels in 2011, said; "And what is the Soviet Union? This is Russia, only it was called differently. in RIA Novosti, Full text of Putin’s interview to Russian TV channels," October 17, 2011, https://ria.ru/20111017/462204254.html.

6 The following online resources have been used to obtain information on the toponyms in the Ottoman Empire during the early 1900s:

-Heinrich Kiepert, Nouvelle carte generale des provinces asiatiques de L’empire Ottoman: sans L’Arabie, (Berlin: Henri Kiepert, 1884), Library of Congress, Map, https://www.loc.gov/item/2013593036/.

-Edward Stanford, Stanford’s popular map of the seat of war / Stanford’s Geogl. Estabt., (London: Edward Stanford, 1877), UWM Libraries, Map,

https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/agdm/id/345/.

-R. Huber, Empire Ottoman: division administrative, [S.l.: s.n], 1899, Map, https://www.loc.gov/item/2007633930/.

-Sevan Nişanyan, Index Anatolicus, Nişanyan, Dec. 2, 2022, https://nisanyanyeradlari.com/.

7 The Turkification of toponyms occurred in different phases between 1915 and the 1990s, leading to the renaming of around 28,000 settlements and topographic names. Most of the altered place names were Armenian, Greek, and Kurdish, with many others in Laz, Georgian, Arabic, Zazaki, Tatar, Persian, and Circassian also being affected. The changes were made on the grounds to prevent ethnic separatism. See Harun Tunçel, Türkiye’de İsmi Değiştirilen Köyler, Fırat Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi vol 10, no. 2, (2000): 27-29.

8 Şükrü Akalın and Mustafa Samet Kumanlı, Turkic Borrowings in the Turkish Language Reform: Past and Today, BILIG, no 98 (2021): 167.

ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

PART I

OTTOMAN EMPIRE:

THE COMMITTEE OF UNION AND PROGRESS (CUP) AND THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Chapter 1

The Great Crime

"They had not fallen into the hands of an enemy who, on a reciprocal basis, had to respect international law. They had fallen into the hands of a far more terrible, unfettered enemy – their own country."⁹

The Ottoman Empire, led by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), forcefully expelled millions of Armenians during World War I (WWI), transporting them by foot caravans to the interior of Anatolia and, subsequently, to the Syrian deserts. The deportation involved all demographics, regardless of age, gender, or health. Most of the victims in these primitively formed pedestrian caravans, which can be described as ‘death marches,’ died of diseases, hunger, thirst, exposure, as well as murder, torture, and rape in the hands of the Ottoman soldiers ostensibly guarding the caravans, members of Special Organization (SO) (Ottoman Turkish: Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa), a semi-official paramilitary organization of the CUP, and irregular Muslim gangs along the roads through which caravans passed, before they could even reach their destinations. Some children and young women were abducted to serve as sex slaves or child laborers. There was no happy ending for those who reached the last destination. Many of those victims died from exposure to unfavorable climate, hunger, illness, and abuse in the makeshift concentration camps with no infrastructure. Other Christian minorities of ‘Rum’ (Greek),¹⁰ Assyrian, Syriac, and Chaldean, also faced the same destiny as Armenians. According to various sources, between 700 thousand to 1.2 million Armenians, between 200 and 400 thousand Assyrians/Syriacs/Chaldeans, and between 300 to 900 thousand Greeks died by murders, intentional ill-treatment, exposure, and starvation during the events have taken place between 1914-1923.

When Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin became aware of the horrible massacres of Armenians, he reacted:

"I didn’t know all the answers, but I felt that a law against this type of racial or religious murder must be adopted by the world."¹¹

The massacre of the Armenians in the last period of the Ottoman Empire guided Lemkin, who also lost all his family in the Holocaust, in his later studies and inspired him to coin the term genocide, which he mentioned for the first time in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation - Analysis of Government - Proposals for Redress (1944).¹² He advocated recognizing genocide as a crime in international law. All these efforts finally led to the 1948 Genocide Convention (Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide) by the UN.

However, Turkey, the sole successor of the Ottoman Empire, insists on denying any wrongdoing by its predecessor. In fact, not only is Turkey the successor of the Ottoman Empire, it is also Ottoman Empire’s ideological twin, and this is the primary subject of this book. The widespread massacres against the Armenians, called ‘Medz Yeghern’ in Armenian, meaning the Great Crime, has been recognized as a genocide by the governments and parliaments of 34 countries as of 2023. The other crimes of the Ottomans which received much less international recognition are the Greek/Pontic Genocide and Assyrian/Syriac/Chaldean Genocide which is also called ‘Sayfo’ or literally, ‘sword’ in Aramaic. However, Turkish official discourse insists on referring to the Armenian Genocide as the ‘so-called Armenian Genocide’ or ‘Armenian Issue.’ Denial of the Armenian Genocide is one of the most critical characteristics of the Turkish history thesis. The Turkish history thesis, which will be questioned frequently in the book, can be described as a pseudoscience, a collection of the officially approved, mostly ultra-nationalist point of view developed by ideological distortion of scientific data and history.

Turkey had long been upset about the recognition of especially the Armenian Genocide by many countries, mainly after the 1980s.¹³ Therefore, Turkey fought back to defend its official narrative inside and outside the country without sparing any expense. The Turkish Historical Society (Türk Tarih Kurumu, TTK), a government-controlled research institute studying the history of Turkey, was founded by Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk), the founder of modern Turkey in 1931 mainly allocated most of its resources to produce publications to debunk the Armenian Genocide for the last few decades. Furthermore, Turkey has hired lobbying companies abroad to influence the parliaments and governments to the denial of the Armenian Genocide and reached out to many foreign and well-known historians for them to author books and articles that fully support Turkish history thesis. As a result, A plethora of similar books and articles, with no scientific basis, have been released to back the Turkish stance in the last few decades.

Denialists mainly use a few arguments as their objection to recognizing the Armenian Genocide. The most overused tactic is to play the victim. First, the claim that the Ottomans had no choice but to enter the war constitutes the first line of defense in victim playing. According to Doğu Perinçek, a Turkish politician advocating for Kemalism¹⁴ (Atatürkism) and Eurasianism, the chief motive behind the start of WWI was the intention of major imperial powers to divide and colonize the territories of the Ottoman Empire. According to this claim, Ottomans couldn’t form an alliance with the Allied powers (also Entente powers) consisting of the UK, France, and Russia, which all had territorial claims against the Ottoman Empire. Establishing an alliance with Germany was the only solution since Germany had no claim against the Turkish territory.¹⁵ However, this claim contradicts the opposing view held by many scholars that the Ottomans entered the war primarily to pursue imperialist ideals. We will elaborate on this claim in subsequent chapters, while presently, we continue with the opposing viewpoints of the denialists.

When it comes to the decision of forced deportations of the Christian subjects of the empire, it is claimed that Ottoman Empire acted legitimately with the reflex to protect its Muslim citizens, especially from the Armenian rebels, and avoid dissolution of the empire. According to this point of view, most civilian deaths were due to inter-communal fighting between Muslim and Christian civilians, not because of government involvement.¹⁶ Denialists further claim that the real victims were Muslims, not the Armenians or, in general, Christian subjects of the empire since Muslims (Turks, Kurds, and others) were just trying to protect themselves from attacks by Christian subjects of the empire who sided with the arch enemies of Ottoman Empire during the WWI, which resulted, to the deaths of not only the Christian subjects but also millions of Muslim civilians.

Turkish historian and politician Prof. Dr. Yusuf Halaçoğlu claimed that Armenians ‘betrayed’ the Ottoman armies on the Caucasus front during WWI since they collaborated with the Russians and caused the Ottoman provinces such as Van, Kars, and Erzerum (Erzurum) to fall into the hands of the Russians. Therefore, he claimed that the deportation of the Armenians should be seen as justifiable self-defense of the state.¹⁷ Given Halaçoğlu’s tenure as a deputy from the right-wing and racist Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) from 2008 to 2011, following his chairmanship of the TTK from 1993 to 2008, it is evident that his perspective mirrors that of Turkish official discourse. For now, it is helpful to underline the word ‘betrayed’ since we will examine this pervasive toxic culture in Turkey in more detail in the following sections of the book.

Another tactic Turkey employs is to understate the Armenian and other Christian populations in the Ottoman Empire and the people killed during the war and aftermath while overstating the deaths of Muslims during the same period. Halaçoğlu contended that the Armenian death toll during the deportation amounted to a mere 47,000, primarily due to diseases, exposure, and hunger. Conversely, he asserted that Armenians killed 532,000 Muslims before the deportation.¹⁸ He probably does not realize that genocide is an act and that it is not directly related to the number of people who died, not to mention his numbers are completely fabricated. Moreover, he engaged in demagoguery by claiming the term ‘deportation’ does not describe the transfer of Armenians to Syrian deserts. He claimed deportation meant ‘sending into exile’ (to another country), but Armenians were relocated to Syria, which was still within the Ottoman territory. Therefore, he asserted that the appropriate terminology was ‘relocation and resettlement.’¹⁹ He also drew an analogy between the deportation of Armenians to the internment of 120,000 American Japanese living on the Pacific coast during World War II (WWII) by the US government. He falsely claimed that thousands of Japanese Americans died during the internment.²⁰

Another well-known yet false argument of the denialists is that no documents proving an act of genocide or intentional massacre have been found in the Ottoman archives so far. To form a basis for this view, they give the example of the British sending the members of the Ottoman administration responsible for the Armenian deportations to the island of Malta at the end of WWI and prosecuting them. It is argued that, although the British Crown Prosecutor’s Office filed the lawsuit, no defendant was sentenced because the court could not find evidence to accuse any defendants.²¹ The argument on which this claim is based is that when the Allied powers occupied Constantinople (Istanbul), they seized all the archives of the Ottoman Empire. Therefore, with this logic, if there were any evidence of genocide in the archives, they would surely use it in the trials. Halaçoğlu further states that the Ottoman archives are open to historians who want to do research, that around 3,000 foreign researchers have benefited from these archives until now, and that no evidence has been found to form a basis for genocide hitherto.²²

Union of Turkish Bar Associations (TBB) has argued that since the Genocide Convention was accepted by the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in December 1948 and entered into force in January 1951, it cannot cover crimes committed in 1915 retrospectively. In addition, it argued that in Article 2 of the convention, political groups were not included among the groups subjected to genocide. Thus according to TBB, Armenians of the Ottoman Empire should have been considered a ‘political group,’ not an ethnic or religious group, because they pursued independence. TBB argued that the events starting in 1915 should be legally excluded from the scope of the Genocide Convention.²³ Considering that the article’s author was the Bar Association’s vice president at the time, it is hard not to think negatively about Turkey’s current justice system. The CUP targeted the members of a specific political party who joined together to pursue specific ideological or policy goals but all Armenians, which cannot be claimed to share the same ideals. Could the Germans also claim that, since many Jews were pursuing the ideal of establishing their state in Palestine, they should not be considered an ethnic or religious group but a political group, and therefore the massacres they faced could not be considered genocide? Why shouldn’t Turks be considered a political group rather than an ethnic group, as they have been pursuing Pan-Turkism under the CUP rule? For denialists, only Turks, but no one else, have a right to statehood.

Without a doubt, the strongest argument of the denialists is that ‘specific intent to kill’ (dolus specialis), which is required to qualify the acts as genocide according to Genocide Convention, did not exist or can not be proven.²⁴ However, this claim has its hidden weakness since it deviates significantly from the effort to present itself as the real victim. It is like a defendant’s plea bargaining by pleading guilty to a lesser charge to avoid harsher penalty terms. The Turkish government implicitly admits that crimes against humanity have been committed but denies it constituted genocide.

Claiming that the international recognition of the Armenian Genocide is purely political, Halaçoğlu even suggested the establishment of a joint commission consisting of Turkish and Western historians, stating that historians should speak, not politicians, to reveal the truth about this issue.²⁵ The former TTK chairman, Halaçoğlu, who proposed to leave the history to historians, said in 2007:

"I have a list of Armenian converts, but I cannot explain."²⁶

Let’s leave out that the person who said this is a former government official and a historian; First, it implies that being an Armenian is a crime or something to be ashamed of in Turkey. Second, it means that the Turkish intelligence prepared such a list. Third, as a historian, how did he gain access to this list, assuming its existence, which should have the utmost secrecy? Halaçoğlu on another occasion, wrote:

"Although they never constituted the majority in the population, the first serious events between the Armenians who claimed the Anatolian lands and the Turks, and Muslims who were the real inhabitants of these lands…"²⁷

If the words ‘Armenians’ and ‘Turks and Muslims’ were to be replaced by ‘Jews’ and ‘Germans,’ it would easily be confused to be a quote from Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf (My Struggle). This statement summarizes the perspective of Halaçoğlu and the Turkish history thesis on Armenians and all ethnic and religious groups except Muslim Turks in general. For the nation-state Turkey, Sunni Muslim Turks are the primary citizens. The others are considered second class citizens, although Article 10 of the Turkish constitution states that all individuals are equal without any discrimination before the law, irrespective of language, race, color, sex, political opinion, philosophical belief, religion, sect, or any such considerations, and further states that no privilege may be granted to any individual, family, group or class. The principles of Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances, which are essential components of democracy, are not de facto present in Turkey. These articles were added to the constitution only to appease the Western countries and international organizations with which Turkey has relations, but they were never put into practice intentionally. The specific aim for the choice of the term ‘betrayed’ used by Halaçoğlu above is more obvious now. What would happen if only a bunch of historians like Halaçoğlu were entitled to decide whether specific acts constitute genocide or not? It was not a proposal made naively or with goodwill.

One might ask why Turkey considered Armenians traitors. It is a somewhat incomplete and misleading question because, according to the Turkish history thesis, not only Armenians but all non-Turks were traitors. Even non-Turkish Muslims like Arabs and Kurds, who had rebelled against the Ottoman Empire with the ideal of independence or autonomy, were also labeled traitors. History textbooks prepared according to this thesis, full of insults and expressions of hatred against minorities and openly portraying Sunni Muslim Turks as the state’s sole ruler and loyal watchdog, are mandatory in all schools, including those that belong to the minorities.

Then, what is the source of this hatred? The answer emerges naturally when the economic woes of the Ottoman Empire are examined. The Ottoman Empire, an imperialist power in a state of constant war, reached its most expansive limits in the 17th century, controlling almost all of the Balkans and North Africa, excluding Morocco, while turning the Black Sea into an inland sea. The taxes collected under various names, particularly from non-Muslims, booty obtained during wars and raids, POWs, and slave trade had an important place in its income. According to the Sharia law, non-Muslims were obliged to pay disproportionately higher taxes than Muslims. At the peak of Ottomans’ strength, the Province of Rumelia, encompassing most of the Balkans, had the highest concentration of Christian population and was more developed than the rest of the empire, thus paid the most taxes. The Province of Egypt came after Rumelia regarding tax income. With the loss of these rich lands, which the Ottomans occupied for hundreds of years, the income of the Ottoman Empire also decreased significantly. The corruption of the Ottoman administration and the excessive military expenditures were financed by foreign loans, which were taken from the second half of the 19th century, and the increasing public debt burden became impossible to pay in later stages. Despite its technological and industrial disadvantages, the Ottoman Empire made a desperate attempt to revive the empire by joining WWI under the leadership of CUP, which was living in a fool’s paradise, ultimately sealing its fate.

Just as the Nazis tried to unify Germany around a national cause in line with their sick worldview blaming Jews for the economic devastation of Germany after WWI, Turkey also created a national cause diverting the blame for its financial woes, which resulted from the bad administrations full of corruptions and human rights violations in the country, on both the Western countries and the minorities that it accused of being their pawns. Robert Paxton stated, in his essay The Five Stages of Fascism, that one of the mobilizing passions present in fascism was the belief that one’s group is a victim. This feeling justifies any action against the group’s external and internal enemies.²⁸

However, Turkey should be given a right on one issue; When it comes to genocide or human rights violations in general, it is witnessed that countries mostly act in line with their short-term political interests instead of making decisions only in the light of objective data. Nevertheless, in spite of Turkey’s assertion, there is no proof that many international organizations and states collaborated to plot against a country and fabricated a genocide for solely political interests. But, for strictly political reasons, many countries abstained from recognizing some genocides, such as Holodomor in Ukraine, committed by USSR under the rule of Joseph Stalin. Similarly, although other than in California, and the Northeast, there is not such a sizable Armenian population, all states except for Mississippi²⁹ recognized the Armenian Genocide, when the US federal government has for many years refused to recognize it for purely political reasons. Ronald Reagan became the first US president to define the events as genocide, although indirectly, and said:

"Like the genocide of the Armenians before it and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it—and like too many other such persecutions of too many other peoples—the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten."³⁰

Finally, in 2019, both wings of the US Congress, the House of Representatives and the Senate, officially recognized the Armenian Genocide. US President Joe Biden concluded the long-overdue process on April 24, 2021, the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, by recognizing the Armenian Genocide.

Was the deportation necessitated by the conditions of war, as Turkey and other denialists allege, or was it an evil plan that was covertly formed and tried to be implemented secretly in the fog of the war? The answer to this question is hidden in the ideology of the CUP and the reasons for its entry into WWI. Therefore, let’s continue our journey, starting with the summary of developments from the establishment of the CUP to its seizing power ultimately and bringing the Ottoman Empire into WWI.

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9 Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, translated by Geoffrey Dunlop and James Reidel (Boston: David R. Godine, 2012), 101.

10 Initially, Rum was the name given to the Latin-speaking people living in the Eastern Roman Empire by the Arabs, but, later it was used only for Greek-speaking people living in Muslim majority countries.

11 Raphael Lemkin and Donna Lee-Ferieze. Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (UK: Yale University Press, 2013), 20.

12 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, USA: Carnegie endowment for international peace, Division of international law, 1944.

13 Uruguay is the first country recognizing Armenian Genocide since 1965.

14 Kemalism or Atatürkism forms the ideological basis of the Republic of Turkey. Kemalism guided the transition from the multi-religious, multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire to the semi-secular and unitary Republic of Turkey. The ideology is based on six principles: Republicanism (cumhuriyetçilik), Nationalism (milliyetçilik), Populism (halkçılık), Laicism (laiklik), Statism (devletçilik), and Reformism (inkılapçılık).

15 Doğu Perinçek, Cihan Savaşına giriş hurafesi - 2 -(TAMAMI), Aydınlık, October 13, 2012, https://www.aydinlik.com.tr/koseyazisi/cihan-savasina-giris-hurafesi-2-tamami-5464.

16 Justin McCarthy, The Armenian Rebellion at Van (USA: University of Utah Press, 2006), 265.

17 Yusuf Halaçoğlu, Osmanlı Devleti Neden Tehcir Uyguladı? Tehcirle İlgili Gerçekler: Osmanlı Son Döneminde Ermeniler (Ankara: TBMM Basımevi, 2021), 57.

18 Dünya Bülteni, Türkler de katledildi, Ermeniler mağduru oynuyor, April 27, 2009, https://www.dunyabulteni.net/arsiv/turkler-de-katledildi-ermeniler-magduru-oynuyor-h74880.html.

19 Yusuf Halaçoğlu, Sürgünden soykırıma Ermeni iddiaları (Turkey: Babıali Kültür Yayıncılığı, 2008), 39.

20 Ibid.

21 Cumhuriyet, Sözde soykırım iddiaları Malta’da denize döküldü, Apr 24, 2022, https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/turkiye/sozde-soykirim-iddialari-maltada-denize-dokuldu-1929096.

22 Halaçoğlu, Osmanlı Devleti Neden Tehcir Uyguladı? Tehcirle İlgili Gerçekler: Osmanlı Son Döneminde Ermeniler, 61.

23 Nazan Moroğlu, Hukuki Açıdan Sözde Ermeni Soykırım İddiaları, Türkiye Barolar Birliği Dergisi, Vol: 28 no:119, (2015): 605-06.

24 Pulat Tacar, Maxime Gauin, State Identity, Continuity, and Responsibility: The Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey and the Armenian Genocide: A Reply to Vahagn Avedian, European Journal of International Law Vol. 23 no. 3, (2012):826.

25 Halaçoğlu, Osmanlı Devleti Neden Tehcir Uyguladı? Tehcirle İlgili Gerçekler: Osmanlı Son Döneminde Ermeniler, 61.

26 Hürriyet, Elimde Ermeni dönmelerin listesi var ama açıklamam, Aug 22, 2007, https://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/elimde-ermeni-donmelerin-listesi-var-ama-aciklamam-7130677.

27 Yusuf Halaçoğlu, Ermeni Tehciri ve Gerçekler, Türk Tarihi Araştırmalari, (2022): 2, https://www.altayli.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/ERMENi-TEHCiRi-VE-GERcEKLER.pdf.

28 Robert Paxton, The Five Stages of Fascism, Journal of Modern History 70, no. 1 (1998): 6.

29 In March 2022, Mississippi officially recognized the Armenian Genocide.

30 Ronald Reagan, Proclamation 4838—Days of Remembrance of Victims of the Holocaust, UC Santa Barbara, April 22, 1981, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-4838-days-remembrance-victims-the-holocaust.

Chapter 2

The Rise of the CUP to Power

The students of the Military Medical School, who believed that the despotic regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II (also II. Abdülhamid) led the Ottoman Empire to disaster, established a secret organization called Ottoman Union Society (Ottoman Turkish: İttihad-ı Osmanî Cemiyeti) in 1889. The students argued it was necessary to re-enact the 1876 Constitution (Ottoman Turkish: Kânûn-ı Esâsî) and to declare the constitutional monarchy again, which was suspended by Abdülhamid II in 1878, to prevent the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, inspired by the organizational structures of the Masonic Lodge and the Italian Carbonari Society, the students held secret meetings for this purpose.

However, because of Abdülhamid II’s ruthless policy of crushing all kinds of opposition, many members of the society were sentenced to imprisonment or banishment. Some of them fled to other countries, especially to Europe. The organization’s members restructured themselves in Europe to have greater freedom in pursuing their opposition. The society separated into two groups because of the differences of opinion in the First Young Turks (Jön Türkler) Congress held in Paris in 1902. Those who favored decentralization of administration and more freedom to different ethnic and religious groups gathered under the leadership of Prince Sabahaddin, who was against Abdülhamid II despite being a member of the Ottoman dynasty. The pro-Turkist and pro-Islamist centralists who favored centralizing the administration gathered under the leadership of Ahmed Rıza Bey.³¹ The latter group took the name Ottoman Committee of Progress and Union (Ottoman Turkish: Osmanlı Terakki ve Ittihad Cemiyeti). In 1907, it merged with the Ottoman Liberty Society (Ottoman Turkish: Osmanlı Hürriyet Cemiyeti), founded by Talat Bey (later awarded the title of Pasha after he became prime minister) in Salonika (Thessaloniki) and members of which were primarily military officers and bureaucrats. It eventually became the Ottoman Committee of Union and Progress (henceforth CUP). Enver Bey (later awarded the title of Pasha), was also a member of the Ottoman Liberty Society. Thus, while Paris remained the new organization’s foreign center, the domestic headquarter was in Salonika. Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), a senior captain in the Ottoman army, joined the organization right after that. The composition of the CUP’s leadership, comprising soldiers and bureaucrats, was a harbinger of a future pandemonium.

At the end of the same year, the Second Young Turks Congress was held in Paris. Many opposition groups, especially the CUP, the Decentralized Community (Ottoman Turkish: Adem-i Merkeziyet Cemiyeti) headed by Prince Sabahaddin, and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Romanized Armenian: Dashnaksutyun or Dashnak for short) took part in the congress. The participants agreed to cooperate, including using violence, to dethrone Abdülhamid II and ensure the proclamation of the Constitutional Monarchy.

It should be highlighted that the Dashnak was an Armenian nationalist organization that sought to achieve an independent Armenia. Among its actions were the rebellions attempted against the Ottoman government in Sason, Diyarbekr (Diyarbakır) in 1894 and Van in 1895, the raid of the Ottoman Bank (Osmanlı Bankası) in Constantinople in 1896, the unsuccessful Yıldız Assassination attempt against Abdülhamid II in 1905, as well as several armed actions in many parts of the Eastern Anatolia between 1895-1904. However, as long as the cause was advantageous to the CUP, it was not a problem for them to collaborate with Armenian nationalists. Hence, the veracity of CUP’s assertions of Armenian revolts as a valid justification for the Armenian deportation can be questioned.

As a matter of fact, when the officers of the CUP revolted in Salonika in 1908, the Dashnaks also supported it. Abdülhamid II, when he failed to quell the uprising, panicked and had to declare the Second Constitutional Monarchy (Ottoman Turkish: 2. Meşrutiyet). Mostly, the candidates supported by the CUP won the elections for the Ottoman