Review: Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide

Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide

Author: Thomas de Waal

ISBN-13: 978-0-19-935069-8

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Guideline Price: £20

On April 24th, 2015, Armenian communities around the globe gathered to solemnly mark a grim centenary. On that day 100 years ago, the Young Turk leadership of the Ottoman Empire ordered the arrest of 250 leading Armenian intellectuals, politicians and religious figures residing in the imperial capital Constantinople (today’s Istanbul).

On the same day, Turkish leaders issued the first explicit orders mandating the mass deportation of Armenians from Turkey’s eastern provinces to the wild deserts of Syria. So began what Armenians simply call “Medz Yeghern” (Great Catastrophe): systematic ethnic cleansing that quickly resulted in the deaths of more than a million Armenians, and the effective destruction of the Turkish Armenian community.

In marking the centenary, President Obama recalled the “horrific violence” inflicted on the Armenian people. In an earlier speech, the US president said that “1.5 million Armenians . . . massacred or marched to their death in the final days of the Ottoman Empire . . . must live on in our memories”. One might have expected the president to earn high praise for his eloquent words of remembrance; instead, Obama found himself attacked from all sides.

Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan said his remarks were “unacceptable” while Armenians attacked Obama for failing to describe the Turks’ century-old campaign of ethnic cleansing as genocide.

And yet Obama was hardly caught off guard by the criticism. As anyone familiar with Armenian and Turkish relations knows, the toxic dispute between the two communities has less to do with anything in the world today and everything to do with the events 100 years ago.

It is this fraught subject – what in another context, the German historian Norbert Frei has called "the politics of the past"– that is the focus of Thomas de Waal's admirably fair-minded new book, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide.

A number of fine, recent books have revisited the atrocities of 1915: Ronald Grigor Suny's They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide makes for particularly rewarding reading. De Waal, by contrast, is less interested in offering a history of the mass killings than in examining how the contestation over the events 1915 came to define the collective identities of Turks and Armenians alike, and how it continues to poison relations between the two peoples.

The story that de Waal tells is not a happy one. On the Turkish side, he describes a powerfully entrenched culture and politics of denial. Whereas Holocaust denial remains largely a fringe movement of hardcore neo-Nazis and anti-Semites, Turkish denials of Medz Yeghern remain very much a mainstream position, the official posture of the state. In Germany, Holocaust denial is treated as a criminal offense; in Turkey those, like Nobel Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk, who dare to criticise the state’s denialist posture, are charged with “Insulting Turkishness” or, as with the intrepid journalist Hrant Dink, gunned down on a street in Istanbul.

And yet in de Waal’s telling, the Armenian response has also been problematic. Covetous of the recognition that Jewish suffering received in the wake of the Holocaust, and inspired by tactics of Palestinian militants, radical Armenian groups embraced assassination as a means of calling attention to the suppressed history of Armenian destruction.

Early assassins targeted figures responsible for the atrocities, but later decades witnessed the killing of many Turkish officials who bore no responsibility for the original crimes and who, at least in several cases, had worked to patch relations between Turks and Armenians. Such killings did little to champion the Armenian cause internationally and made for fractious disputes within the Armenian community itself.

More recently, the independent republic of Armenia has been accused of perpetrating war crimes in settling territorial disputes with neighbouring Azerbaijan; as de Waal suggests, a politics of collective victimisation can too easily come to justify and underwrite all manner of acts of aggression.

Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of de Waal’s account involves the role the G-word has played in frustrating attempts to bring reconciliation between the two communities. In a book published in 1944, a Polish-Jewish adviser to the US War Department named Raphael Lemkin coined a new term to describe the Nazis’ treatment of Jews in German occupied countries. Wedding an ancient Greek word for group (genos) to a Latin word for killing (cide), Lemkin’s resulting neologism meant to describe something distinct from mass murder, and more grave.

For Lemkin, genocide sought to signify “a coordinated . . . destruction of essential foundations of the life of . . . groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves”.

Within four years of its coining, on December 9th, 1948, the United Nations voted to recognise genocide as an international crime, and today genocide stands, in the words of William Schabas, as the “crime of crimes” – the most serious crime recognised by any legal code.

And yet a term meant to promote historical clarity and legal reckoning has only, according to de Waal, created greater enmity between Turks and Armenians, and has frustrated the difficult task of honestly and sensitively coming to terms with the past.

At the time, Turkey was quite forthright in acknowledging its acts of ethnic cleansing. In August 1915, when Henry Morgenthau, US ambassador to the Ottoman empire, met with Talaat Pasha to protest the Turks’ “systematic attempts” to “bring destruction” to “peaceful Armenian populations,” the Turkish leader blithely responded, “It’s no use for you to argue . . . we have already disposed of three quarters of the Armenians.”

All the same, Turkey has rejected the “G-word” with a vehemence that de Waal likens to national “paranoia”– fearful that the designation, if accepted, would underwrite Armenian demands for reparations and territorial concessions. And so the Turkish state continues to relativise and justify the atrocities of the past as the unfortunate excesses of a war in which all groups – Armenians and Turks alike – suffered greatly.

On the other hand, de Waal believes the Armenian community has also done itself a disservice by drawing a line the sand on the genocide question. Mass atrocity, administrative massacres, ethnic cleansing – seemingly no other term will do, except genocide. While de Waal does not doubt that the events of 1915 fit the definition, he questions what good can come from placing such pressure on a single word.

In exploring the fraught politics of Turkish and Armenian memory, de Waal has delivered an important, balanced but less than entirely gripping book. Great Catastrophe begins and ends as a travelogue, recording the author's interviews with people from ravaged Armenian communities still trying to negotiate an unassimilated past. The bulk of the book, by contrast, presents a rather conventional narrative history. In the travelogue chapters, de Waal demonstrates good observation and descriptions, but the writing elsewhere is at best workmanlike – flat, anodyne sentences such as "the republic then doubled in size" and "in Diyarbakir . . . society has opened up the most" abound.

Great Catastrophe offers, then, less a scintillating than a necessary read. It admirably demonstrates how contestations over a history of atrocity continue to shape – and distort – today's politics.

Lawrence Douglas is is a professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College, Massachusetts