From the start, despite their liberalism, the Young Turks were insistent on Muslim and Turkish supremacy. They feared non-Muslim supremacy in parliament and manipulated elections to ensure a Muslim majority. They believed, probably correctly, that only the Muslim element would work to maintain the empire’s integrity.39 To ensure their dominance the Young Turks were ready to use power ruthlessly. According to some, they brutalized political life. They successfully mobilized the people, held mass meetings, and organized effective boycotts of foreign goods.40
The Congress of the Committee for Union and Progress met in Saloniki in October 1911 and proclaimed a nationalistic pan-Islamic program. “The sole reign of the Turkish race and the construction of the Empire on a purely Islamic basis” became the program of the government according to the German doctor Johannes Lepsius, president of the German-Armenian Society.
Sooner or later the total Islamization of all Turkish subjects must be accomplished, but it is clear that this can never be achieved by verbal persuasion, therefore the power of arms must be resorted to. The character of the Empire will have to be Mohammedan, and respect for Mohammedan institutions and traditions is to be enforced. Other nations must be denied the right to organize because decentralization and self-government would constitute treason against the Turkish Empire. The nationalities will become a negligible quantity. They could keep their religion, but not their language. The proliferation of the Turkish language would be a principal means to secure Mohammedan predominance and to assimilate the remaining elements.41
New visions set new goals: the creation of a single pure and homogeneous Turkic culture and an empire that would unite all the Turkic peoples, a worthy successor to the late Ottoman Empire.42 The Young Turks feared that the Armenians might succeed in creating an independent state in eastern Anatolia, which would form a barrier between the Ottoman Turks and Turkic people to the east and destroy the possibility of the new empire.43 Greater Turkishness, a national-cultural purity, and the creation of a new empire were to reestablish a feeling of unity and positive identity in Turks, including the Young Turk leaders themselves.
The machinery of destruction
As in Germany, preparations that initially served other purposes later came to function as part of the machinery of genocide. The Young Turks set up a party apparatus whose leaders in the Armenian regions became organizers of the genocide. The genocide was under the control of the Interior Ministry, led by Talat, and its subsidiaries, the Directorate of Public Security, the Istanbul police, and the Deportation Service, as well as the provincial gendarmerie. Turkish refugees from emancipated Balkan countries were also active. At the time of the genocide, a special organization was created to massacre the Armenians deported in convoys. It consisted of jailed criminals who were freed, organized into detachments, and placed, together with other suitable groups such as Kurds, in the path of Armenians on the deportation march.44 Executive officers of cities were instructed to evacuate Armenians along designated routes, guarded by military police.
The genocide
A group of political activists had gained power in Turkey. Within a few years their hopes and visions were profoundly frustrated by losses of wars and territories and by all the hardships and internal conflicts inside Turkey, including Armenian opposition and actions. In response to these conditions, their nationalistic ideology became more extreme. The Young Turks could at least in part deal with their intense frustrations, with the experience of threat and attack, and the resulting needs and motives by turning against the Armenians, one of the few enemies they could defeat. Genocide was not intrinsically tied to ideology, as it was in Germany. But it was a way – maybe the only one available at the time – to fulfill both ideological goals and emotional needs.
The Turkish population adopted the nationalistic fervor, and shared with its leaders the complex of motives and lack of prohibitions that I have previously described as reasons why a society turns against a subgroup. Those selected to perpetrate the genocide were willing, and the rest of society gave its support. A telegram to Jemal Bey, a delegate at Adana, said that it was the duty of all to realize the noble project of “wiping out of existence the Armenians who have for centuries been constituting a barrier to the Empire’s progress in civilization.”45 As in the Holocaust, the killings were meant to realize a “higher” value.
It is known that specific orders for genocide were given by the government. The evidence comes from telegrams captured by the British and from accounts by foreign observers, including a detailed account by the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau.46 A frequently quoted “memoir” was published in London in 1920 by Nairn Bey, the chief secretary of the Aleppo committee in charge of deported Armenians.a48 Another memoir, by Merlanzade Rifat, a Young Turk on the committee’s Central Board, described the meeting at which the extermination policy was decided.49 Rifat’s account shows that the leadership meant to revitalize Turkey by purging it of non-Turkish nationalities, especially Armenians. The war provided the opportunity to exterminate them.
The Naim-Andonian documents outline a “radical solution” to the lingering Turko-Armenian conflict. They contain no reference to the wartime conduct of the Armenian populations, but refer to “the humiliations and bitterness of the past.”50 Morgenthau notes that Talat referred to the policy as the result of prolonged and careful deliberation. The documents show secret orders from various ministers. All Armenians were to be killed and
