anarkismo.net: The Armenian Genocide: An Open Wound by Sungur Savran

The Bullet To the memory of Stepan Shaumyan, Armenian Bolshevik leader of the Baku Commune 
in 1918, and of Hrant Dink, Armenian socialist intellectual from Istanbul who, until his 
assassination in 2007, exerted a Herculean effort to bring the genocide into the centre of 
attention in Turkey. ---- On April 24, 1915, hundreds of Armenian intellectuals, 
politicians and community leaders were rounded in Istanbul (or Constantinople as it was 
then called in the West) by the Ottoman state, to be subsequently sent to exile from which 
most never returned. This was the signal that set off a chain of events that ended in a 
tragedy the like of which has rarely been witnessed in the annals of modern history. The 
Armenians, who had been living in the eastern part of the Anatolian plateau from time 
immemorial, were forcibly deported from their homes in almost every city in what is now 
Turkey, ostensibly to their destination Dar ez Zor in the Syrian desert.

Up to a million and a half died in the process. Women were abducted, raped and killed. 
Young children were sent to orphanages and forcibly Islamized. All the property belonging 
to Armenians, houses and gardens, farms and orchards, cattle and sheep, workshops and 
tools, trade houses and factories were seized by the state or simply grasped by the 
Turkish ruling strata. Churches were made into warehouses or left to rust and community 
hospitals and schools were taken away.

On the eve of World War I, different estimates and censuses put the Armenian population of 
Anatolia between 1.2 million and close to 2 million. At the end of the war, the only 
sizeable Armenian population was left in Istanbul and the overall figure had fallen below 
a mere 100 thousand. What was to become present-day Turkey was thus "cleansed" of its 
Armenian population. The Turks had entered Anatolia as a result of the victory obtained by 
the Seldjukides over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. They cohabited 
with the autochthonous Armenians for close to a millennium. The Ottoman Empire regarded 
the Armenians as the "loyal nation," and yet it was this very same state that betrayed 
them, massacred them and extirpated them from their homes and their motherland.

Implications for the Future of the Middle East

There is not a shred of doubt that this was genocide of the worst kind. Of course, the 
concept may sound like an anachronism in this context since it was first coined as a legal 
concept in the aftermath of World War II. However, we do not approach the question of the 
Armenian genocide from a legalistic viewpoint. Our concern is to re-establish friendship 
and trust between the workers and labourers of Turkey and Armenia. For us this is first 
and foremost a political question that has to do with the prospect of revolution in the 
region. All social upheavals in the Eurasian land mass from 1905 and 1917 to the period 
1989-1991 passing through World War I witnessed massacres involving the Armenians, the 
Turks and the Azeris, the latter being the ethnic brethren of Anatolian Turks inhabiting 
the Caucasus. On the other hand, the Armenians and the Kurds each claim roughly the same 
geographic territory as their historic motherland. So the fate of the revolution in the 
Caucasus, Anatolia and Mesopotamia hinges upon the relationships established between these 
four peoples. Proletarian revolution cannot succeed here unless it sets in motion a 
process that culminates in the Socialist Federation of the Caucasus and in parallel the 
Socialist Federation of the Middle East, where Turk and Armenian and Kurd will have to 
cohabit. Hence the debate on the Armenian genocide is by no means a futile exercise on a 
long bygone historic event, but really concerns the future of the revolution in this whole 
region.

The Turkish state and those historians and intellectuals who act as its mouthpiece have 
consistently denied the genocide. Their arguments range from the minimization of 
casualties (the lowest figure cited being 320 thousand as against the 1.5 million put 
forward by many Armenian and other historians) to the claim that the massacres were 
reciprocal. They forget two simple facts. First, the Armenian population of eastern 
Anatolia was almost totally eradicated from the face of Anatolia. So to count the numbers 
of the dead is only a part of the genocide debate. Secondly, state power was in the hands 
of the Turkish dominant nation, which renders all talk about mutual carnage empty chatter.

Genocide as Class Struggle

The classical explanation offered for this barbaric cruelty by liberal historiography in 
Turkey and nationalist historiography of the Armenians both in contemporary Armenia and 
the Diaspora has been that it was the outcome of the "construction of Turkish identity" or 
of "Unionist mentality," the latter implying the world outlook of the Committee of Union 
and Progress, the party then in power. These are, of course, philosophically idealistic 
approaches that beg the question of why the identity or the mentality in question became 
dominant specifically at that historical juncture. But there is worse. It is a very 
widespread view among Westerners, Armenians and Westernized Turks that somehow the Muslim 
or the Turk or both partake of some kind of evil, that it is from the nature of the 
religion or the ethnicity in question that this barbarism proceeds. This kind of racist 
characterization is hardly ever pronounced in writing or in public nowadays, but it is 
still voiced in private conversation.

Our view on the determinants of the Armenian genocide is fundamentally different from 
almost all commentators. We assert that what lay behind the Armenian genocide was class 
struggle of several orders. The vicious attacks against the Armenians had its earliest 
roots in the looting of the surplus product of the Armenian peasantry by the ruling 
stratum of Kurdish tribes, which shared the same geographical territory with the 
Armenians. The later but stronger and more radical drive came from the urge for primitive 
accumulation on the part of the nascent Turkish bourgeoisie at the turn of the century 
fighting against the economic dominance of the non-Muslim moneyed classes in Ottoman 
society. It was this class fraction that was represented by the Unionists in power and 
dispossessed the Armenian and, in a different manner, Greek population of Anatolia to 
amass capital in its own hands. Marx's remarks on primitive accumulation in Capital sound 
prophetic in regard to the Armenian genocide: "If money, according to Augier, 'comes into 
the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to 
foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." In Turkey the blood and dirt of primitive 
accumulation took the form of genocide.

These domestic factors were reinforced by the support extended to the Turkish bourgeoisie 
by the German imperialist bourgeoisie, instrumentalizing the power of the Ottoman state in 
its intra-class struggle against the other imperialist bourgeoisies of Europe, that is, 
British, French and Russian.

The Importance of German Complicity

This last fact is of utmost importance. Germany was the ally and protector of the Ottoman 
state during World War I. The commanders of the Ottoman-Turkish army were German field 
marshals, generals and admirals. It is absolutely impossible for the genocide to have 
taken place without German consent, even positive encouragement. The German Kaiser and the 
Reich were already responsible for the genocide of the Herrero people in what was then 
called German Southwest Africa, what is present-day Namibia. Hence, there is no reason to 
rule out even a scenario in which Germany may have instigated the ruling Union and 
Progress Committee and its strong man Enver Pasha to implement this "final solution" to 
the Armenian question. Enver Pasha was a personal protégé of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The latter 
is notorious for his secretive and personalized management of foreign and military 
affairs. The Kaiser's government expected the Ottomans to threaten both Russia and Britain 
in their Asian backyards by propagating a simultaneously pan-Turkist and pan-Islamist 
political onslaught. The Armenians stood in between the Ottomans and the Muslim and Turkic 
peoples of Asia. Hence, in an objective sense, the Armenian genocide served the wartime 
aims of German imperialism.

Of course, all this does not necessarily mean the German government was involved as an 
accomplice in the genocide. However, it is only through a study of the archives, including 
top secret documents, that the truth of this matter can be discovered.

Where does the significance of all this lie? Let us start with a general proposition. 
Recognition of the genocide is the primary act in the direction of redressing the 
suffering of the Armenian people and of rekindling a modicum of fraternity and trust 
between the peoples of the region. The problem is that, left on their own, Turkey and the 
Armenians, both Armenia proper and the Diaspora, have locked horns for a very long time. 
The Turkish state and those historians and intellectuals who act as its mouthpiece have 
consistently denied the genocide. The absurd concept of the "Turkish thesis," denoting 
full denial of the genocide, is testimony to the stubborn position of the Turkish state. 
The titanic effort of Hrant Dink, an Istanbul Armenian formerly a revolutionary socialist, 
to create an awareness of the question throughout Turkish society in the 1990s and early 
2000s created an immense breach in the wall of silence that had earlier been imposed. 
Hrant Dink was assassinated in 2007 through a conspiracy prepared by the so-called "deep 
state" of Turkey, but his legacy lives on. If we are today able in Turkey to discuss this 
question openly, most of the credit goes to the Herculean work carried out by Hrant Dink 
and his still extant bilingual weekly Agos. However, the overall situation cannot be said 
to have changed irreversibly. The genocide is still mentioned in the media perforce as 
"the so-called genocide."

The question of the recognition of the genocide cannot be resolved by the ill-conceived 
pressures of the state organs of some imperialist countries and is positively harmed by 
such irresponsible theatrics such as that of the Pope in early April, conspicuous for its 
lack of modesty coming from the head of an institution wholly immersed in the Holocaust. 
However, for the reasons explained above Germany is the exception.

It is a noteworthy fact that although many European governments and parliaments (including 
France, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden etc. and the European 
Parliament recently for a second time) have recognized the 1915 events as genocide and 
called on Turkey to do likewise, Germany has remained very much in the shadows on this 
question. This fact glares with significance.

We believe that it is the duty of the German socialist and working-class movements and 
German democrats to press for the complete opening of German archives relevant to that 
historical period. We summon them to press the German government to recognize and condemn 
the Armenian genocide.

If Germany does recognize the Armenian genocide, with documents in hand, the 
Turkey-Armenia polarization will be cast in a new light and the obscurantism of the 
"Turkish thesis" will receive a fatal blow. This is the only way to fraternity and trust 
between the peoples of the region.

Needless to say, the real effort to make the Turkish government recognize the genocide 
falls on the shoulders of the Turkish and Kurdish left. We appeal to the German and 
international movements for efforts without forgetting for one single moment that the 
blood spilled by the Turkish bourgeoisie and the Kurdish tribal ruling class can only be 
cleansed by the Turkish and Kurdish proletariat and the peasantry.

Related Link: http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/1109.php#continue

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