The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response by Peter Balakian
About the Author
Peter Balakian is a poet and professor at Colgate University in New York State. The book being reviewed here won the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize.
Geography of Armenia
During the European Middle Ages, Armenia was a large country situated between the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim Arab empire. Mount Ararat is in Armenia. The part on the northeast coast of the Mediterranean was called Cilician Armenia (also Lesser Armenia). North of Armenia were the Pontic Greeks on the Black Sea. South and east of Armenia were the Kurds and the oil fields of Mosul in Mesopotamia (Iraq).
History of Armenia
- 301 AD: Armenia becomes the first nation to make Christianity its official religion
- 1064 AD: The Seljuk Turks first attacked Armenia
- 1189 AD: Armenia participated in the Third Crusade
- 1375 AD: Cilician Armenia fell to the Muslim Mamluk soldiers
- 1453 AD: Constantinople (Byzantium) fell to the Ottoman Turks
Christians in the Middle East
The Armenians are a Christian people. Other eastern Christian people in the region include Greek Orthodox, Assyrian, Maronite (Lebanon), Nestorian and Copts (Egypt). Many Assyrians and Pontic Greeks were also killed during the time of the Armenian Genocide, but their fates are touched on only briefly in this book.
Dhimmis in the Ottoman Empire
Armenians and all other Christians (and Jews) were dhimmis, second-class citizens under Muslim rule. Dhimmis had to pay a tax which was not levied on Muslims. Dhimmis were not allowed to own weapons. Some of the Armenian boy children were conscripted to become Muslim soldiers and civil servants called Devşirme. The Kurds, who were nomadic herders, had the legal right (Kishlak) to stay in Armenian homes during the winter.
Russian Empire
During the nineteenth century, Russia fought several wars against the Ottoman Empire, the most famous being the Crimean War (1853-1856). Since the Russians were also Christians (Eastern Orthodox), many Armenians saw Russia as their protector. A small minority of Armenians even collaborated with the Russians militarily. This made the Turks suspect Armenians in general of disloyalty to the Ottoman Empire.
Tanzimat (19th Century)
Tanzimat (reorganization) was a nineteenth-century Ottoman reform movement that increased the civil rights of non-Muslim ethnicities in the Ottoman empire. It was opposed by traditional Muslims, who still believed in dhimmitude.
Sasun Tax Rebellion (1894)
Armenians were required to pay taxes to both the Kurds and the Turks. The tax-resistance movement, lead by the Armenian Hunchak Party, started in Sasun (near Lake Van in Eastern Turkey) in the early 1890s. The Kurds responded by killing three thousand Armenians in Sasun in 1894.
Hamidian Massacres (1895-96)
In 1895 Turkish Caliph Sultan Abdul Hamid II ordered his troops to kill Armenians and burn their villages in the region around Zeitun in Cilician Armenia. They killed about two hundred thousand Armenians, half directly, and the other half by famine and disease. Another 50 thousand other Armenians were expelled from Turkey.
Help from the United States (1896)
Many of the individuals who had been active in the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movements came to the help of the Armenian Christians who had suffered under the Hamidian Massacres. Americans were especially upset by the rape and sexual enslavement of Armenian women. The American Red Cross sent medical care teams. Some of the more prominent heroes were:
- Julia Ward Howe
- William Lloyd Garrison, Jr.
- Isabel Barrows
- Alice Stone Blackwell
- Ohannes Chatschumian
- Clara Barton
- Julian B. Hubbell
- Ira Harris
- Grace Kimball
The Young Turks (1908 on)
The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) was a Turkish nationalist movement whose goal was to replace the shrinking Ottoman Empire and traditional Islamic caliphate by a state based on Turkish ethnic nationalism. Informally, they were called the Young Turks, and in Turkish their name was İttihad ve Terakki. In 1908, the Caliph Abdul Hamid II was replaced by a government of the Young Turks. Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha and Djemal Pasha were three of their main leaders. Talaat Pasha was a Bulgarian gypsy, head of the secret police, and administered the six Armenian provinces in eastern Turkey. Enver Pasha spoke German fluently and worshipped Prussian militarism. On the positive side, they were modern, Western-oriented, and secular.
Adana Massacre (1909)
The urban Armenians living in Adana in Cilician Armenia were envied for their wealth by the poor Turks living there. In 1909 many Turks looted the Armenian shops in the Armenian Quarter of Adana. The Armenians were armed, so they fought back. The looters killed two thousand Armenians in Adana. A cease-fire was arranged and the Armenians were disarmed. Then the Young Turks sent in troops, who slaughtered even more Armenians. Nearby towns and villages were also attacked. About twenty thousand Armenians were killed in total.
Ethnic Cleansing
In order to make Turkey more purely Turkish, the Young Turks practiced ethnic cleansing. They asked foreign businesses to discharge their Greek, Armenian and Jewish employees. In 1913 Talaat Pasha ordered boycotts against all Greek merchants. Like the Jews before Israel, and like the Kurds even now, the Armenians were a stateless people, which made them vulnerable.
Armenian Genocide
- 1915: The CUP’s Ministry of the Interior created the Special Organization (Teshkilât-i Mahsusa), which organized chetes (killing squads), many composed of violent felons released from prison especially for the purpose of killing Armenians
- February 25, 1915: All the Armenian men in the Ottoman army were disarmed and put into labor battalions. They then worked building roads and railways for the Ottoman army. Many of them were later slaughtered. Armenian civilians were also disarmed. They were required to turn in their weapons, and local officials searches Armenian homes for weapons.
- April 1915: Djevdet Bay, the brother-in-law of Enver Pasha, issued a proclamation stating that the Armenians must be exterminated and that any Muslim protecting a Christian would have his house burned down and his family and himself killed
- April 1915: Arrest of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople
- April 1915: First Armenian deportations, from Zeitun, then from Van. Armenians were deported in cattle cars of the Baghdad Railway (recently built by the Germans) or by forced marches. Armenians were deported to Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Russia and Iran.
- June-July 1915; deportations from eastern Armenia
- July-August 1915: deportation of Cilician Armenians
- August-September 1915: deportations from southeastern Armenia
- September 1915: Temporary Law of Expropriation and Confiscation (of Armenian property)
- Summer 1916: Deported Armenians at concentration camps at Deir ez-Zor in the northern Syrian desert were massacred
- 1915-1922: One to one-and-a-half million Armenians were killed or died during death marches
- The American people were well informed of the genocide, as it was happening, due to numerous reports from American Christian missionaries and Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (1913-1916)
Post-Genocide: Denial of Statehood for Armenia
- 1918: American Committee for the Independence of Armenia is formed
- 1920: San Remo conference: Britain and France divided up oil fields of Mosul
- 1920: Treaty of Sèvres: Nationhood for Armenia and Kurdistan (later repealed)
- 1921: Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic created
- 1923: Lausanne Conference Treaty replaced the earlier Treaty of Sèvres
- The Lausanne Treaty denied statehood for Armenia and Kurdistan.
- The Lausanne Treaty did not even contain the word Armenia!
- To its credit, the United States refused to sign the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, because it denied the Armenians a homeland.
- But the European powers signed the Treaty of Lausanne, because they wanted access to the oil fields of the former Ottoman Empire (e.g., Mosul).
Americans Who Opposed Statehood for Armenia
- Rear Admiral Mark L. Bristol
- Allen W. Dulles (Chief of the Division of Near Eastern Affairs of the U.S. State Department, 1922-1927)
- Robert Lansing (U.S. Secretary of State, 1915-1920)
- Charles Evans Hughes (U.S. Secretary of State, 1921-1925)
Ongoing Turkish Denial
During the 1980’s the U.S. Congress tried to pass bills commemorating anniversaries of the Armenian Genocide, but they failed, due to Turkish threats to close down U.S. military bases in Turkey and to terminate contracts with American defense companies. The Turkish government gives money to some professors at American universities who deny that the Armenian genocide ever occurred.
Soviet Armenia
Soviet Armenia, which became the current nation of Armenia after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, includes only the part of Armenia in the former Soviet Union, and not the part of traditional Armenia that lies in eastern Anatolia, which is still ruled by Turkey.
