{"id":9454,"date":"2018-06-07T10:59:02","date_gmt":"2018-06-07T08:59:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/?p=9454"},"modified":"2018-06-14T15:02:14","modified_gmt":"2018-06-14T13:02:14","slug":"whether-armenia-the-nazis-or-isis-if-youre-going-to-commit-genocide-you-cant-do-it-without-the-help-of-local-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/2018\/06\/whether-armenia-the-nazis-or-isis-if-youre-going-to-commit-genocide-you-cant-do-it-without-the-help-of-local-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Whether Armenia, the Nazis or Isis \u2013 if you’re going to commit genocide, you can\u2019t do it without the help of local people"},"content":{"rendered":"

Independent<\/a><\/p>\n

Robert Fisk<\/a>\u00a0\/\u00a0@indyvoices<\/a><\/p>\n

This is not something new \u2013 but it is something we too often forget<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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How do you organise a successful genocide \u2013 in Turkish Armenia a century ago, in Nazi-occupied Europe in the 1940s, or in the Middle East today? A remarkable\u00a0investigation by a young Harvard scholar \u2013 focusing on the slaughter of Armenians in a single Turkish Ottoman city 103 years ago \u2013 suggests the answer is simple: a genocidal government must have the local support of every branch of respectable society: tax officials, judges, magistrates, junior police officers, clergymen, lawyers, bankers and, most painfully, the neighbours of the victims.<\/p>\n

Umit Kurt\u2019s detailed paper on the slaughter of the Armenians of Antep in southern Turkey in 1915, which appears in the latest edition of the\u00a0Journal of Genocide Research<\/em><\/a>, concentrates on the dispossession, rape and murder of just 20,000 of the one and a half million Armenian Christians slaughtered by the Ottoman Turks in the first holocaust of the 20th century. It not only details the series of carefully prepared deportations from Antep and the pathetic hopes of those who were temporarily spared \u2013 a story tragically familiar to so many stories of the Jewish ghettoes of Eastern Europe \u2013 but lists the property and possessions which the city authorities and peasants sought to lo ot from those they sent to their deaths.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The local perpetrators thus seized farms, pistachio groves, orchards, vineyards, coffee houses, shops, watermills, church property, schools and a library. Officially this was called \u201cexpropriation\u201d or \u201cconfiscation\u201d, but as Umit Kurt points out, \u201chuge numbers of people were bound together in a circle of profit that was at the same time a circle of complicity\u201d. The author, born in modern-day Gaziantep\u00a0in Turkey\u00a0\u2013 the original Antep \u2013 is of Kurdish-Arab origin, and his spare, dry prose makes his 21-page thesis all the more frightening.<\/p>\n

He draws no parallels between the Armenian holocaust \u2013 a phrase the Israelis themselves use of the Armenians \u2013 and the Jewish holocaust nor the current genocidal outrages in the modern Middle East. But no one can read Umit Kurt\u2019s words without being reminded of the armies of ghosts who haunt later history; the collaborators of Nazi-occupied France, of the Polish collaborators of the Nazis in Warsaw and Krakow and of the tens of thousands of Sunni Muslim civilians who allowed Isis to enslave Yazidi women and destroy the Christians of Nineveh. These victims, too, found themselves dispossessed by their neighbours, their homes looted and their property sold off by the officials who should have protected them as they faced their own extermination.<\/p>\n

One of the most powerful of Kurt\u2019s arguments is that a central government cannot succeed in exterminating a minority of its people without the support of their fellow citizens: the Ottomans needed the Muslims of Antep to carry out the deportation orders in 1915 \u2013 rewarded with the property of those they were helping to liquidate \u2013 just as the local people needed the central authority to legitimise what we would today call war crimes.<\/p>\n

Umit Kurt is one of the few academics to recognise the growing economic power of the Ottoman Armenians in the decades before the genocide; \u201cthe Muslim community\u2019s envy and resentment,\u201d he writes, \u201cplayed a central role in the hatemongering atmosphere\u201d. So, too, did repeated Ottoman claims that the Armenians were helping Turkey\u2019s Allied enemies \u2013 the same \u201cstab in the back\u201d betrayal routine which Hitler used to rally the Nazis against communists and Jews in the Weimar Republic. In the Middle East today, it is the \u201cinfidels\u201d \u2013 the \u201cCrusader\u201d (ie\u00a0pro-Western) Christians \u2013 who have been fleeing for their lives for supposedly betraying Islam.<\/p>\n

You would have to have the proverbial heart of stone not to be moved by the story of the Antep Armenians in the spring of 1915. Although initially harassed by the murderous Ottoman \u201cSpecial Organisation\u201d \u2013\u00a0Teskilat-i Mahsusa<\/em>, the nearest equivalent to the Nazi\u00a0Einsatzgruppen\u00a0<\/em>of the 1940s \u2013 and subject to temporary arrest, the Armenians of Antep were, at first, left alone. But they saw Armenian transports from other towns passing through Antep, the first containing 300 women and children, \u201cinjured, their wounds infected and their clothes in tatters\u201d. For two more months, deportation convoys moved through the town and into a wilderness of suffering. \u201cArmenian girls and boys had been kidnapped; women\u2019s belongings and money had been plundered; they had been raped publicly with the active complicity of gendarmeries and government officials.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like the Jews of Europe who were initially left untouched by the genocide of their co-religionists, the Antep Armenians could not believe their possible fate. \u201cIn spite of everything that was happening around us\u2026\u201d one eyewitness wrote, \u201cthe number of those who buried their heads in the sand like an ostrich was not small. These people convinced themselves that they were happy, and they were trying to deceive themselves into believing that a similar deportation was not possible for Aintab [sic] and that nothing bad would happen to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like brave Polish families and the few Oskar Schindlers of Nazi Germany, a few courageous Turks opposed the Armenian genocide. Celal Bey, the governor of Aleppo \u2013 61 miles from Antep \u2013 refused to deport Armenians. But he was dismissed. And the Christian Armenians of Antep were doomed.<\/p>\n