'They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else' - Ronald Grigor Suny

Dr. Ronald Suny has various interests, but has spent much of his profession centered on non-Russian nationalities of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, particularly those of the South Caucasus, Armenian, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. He is the former director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan, and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago.

He was the first holder, oh, I should have asked you how to correctly pronounce this name. He was the, he is the first holder of the Alex Manugian, excellent, Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan after beginning his career as an assistant professor at Oberlin College. He is a 2013 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and truly it is our pleasure to have him here for an hour to learn and to listen and to dialogue. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Ronald Suny.

Thank you all for coming on this lovely evening. I was listening to some people in the audience talking about Armenia, the Armenians.

And the difficulty of pronouncing and learning Armenian names like Manugian, and I remember my uncle, who was an accountant, had a client named Mugurdich Der Mugurdichian, and one day Mugurdich Der Mugurdichian came to my uncle and said, Charlie, I changed my name. Americans cannot pronounce my name. I changed it. My uncle said, well, Mugurdich, what did you change your name to? I am now Mike Der Mugurdichian.

I tell that story because I'm going to talk about something that is perhaps a bit esoteric, about a part of the world which you may not be as familiar with as you are with the United States or Western Europe.

I'm going to tell the story of why, when, and how the genocide of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire happened. The way I tell this story is of a moment of historical passage, when empires attempted to accommodate themselves to a transforming world in which nations and national states were challenging their sources of power and legitimacy.

Yet these empires, like the Russian Empire in 1915, 14, 15, or the Ottoman Empire, were not ready to give in or give up. They were not prepared to surrender to what later would appear to be irresistible pressures of nationalism, popular endowment, and regimes based on equality and merit, rather than as empires are, on inherited privilege, difference, and hierarchy. Looking back from the future, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of subject nations appears to us to be historically inevitable.

But for the actors in those last decades of the 19th century and the first of the 20th century, there were many possible roads that could have been taken. So my talk tonight and the book on which it is based, investigates those moments of choice when certain political actors might have acted differently, but decided instead to embark on a course that led to devastation and destruction, even the destruction of their own empire. As you guys in the audience may know, the recovery of a difficult past is a challenge to those who would through distorting sophistries deny or minimize the enormity of a human tragedy.

You might call such people who deny what happens assassins of memory. Now, nations and states have long been in the business of fabricating, sometimes more honestly than at others, myths and stories of their origins, their golden ages, their heroic deeds, their victories, their triumphs, while eliminating the blemishes of defeats and failures or even mass murders. What appears to be new in our time is the brazenness of what is claimed, the blatant cynicism of the perpetrators and the potential reach through mass print and broadcast media and the internet.

And so historians, reluctantly, but inevitably, have been pulled into this war of images and words. And I suppose that's why we have here a National Memorial Museum for World War I, to set the record straight, to tell what we can know, and to fight against falsifying, falsified myths and images. The only weapon against bad history, deployed for political or personal vindication, is scrupulous investigation that results in evidence-based narration and analysis of what is possible to know. Historians can take some comfort in the thought that dangers lurk when intellectual constructs stray too far from careful and accurate readings of the world.

Reality has a nasty habit of biting back. Well, we know as historians that revision is constant. Maybe it's even necessary. That's what we historians do. That's why we have tenure often, because we have to fight against some of the older, more orthodox notions. But in the Armenian case, this revision, this discussion of what happened in 1915, 1916, has led to the creation of two opposing, separate, and contradictory narratives, two ways of telling this story that seem to make impossible reconciliation. On the one side, and you might have heard this in the last couple weeks, as the Turkish state and its Prime Minister Erdogan have been trying to say there was no genocide and to justify what happened and explain somehow the disappearance of hundreds of thousands, more than a million of their Armenian subjects.

So on one side, you have the Turkish state and a few, we can call them historians, I would call them pseudo scholars, who reject the notion of genocide and argue that the tragedy that happened was the result of a reasonable and understandable response of a government to a rebellious and seditious population in time of war and mortal danger to the state's survival. In other words, raison d'état, reason of state, justified the suppression of rebellion and mass killing, well, it's explained as the unfortunate residue or what we now call in the fashionable language, collateral damage of legitimate efforts to establish order behind the lines.

This position, which those of us who recognize 1915 as a genocide call denialist, might be summarized as this way, very simply. There was no genocide and the Armenians are to blame for it. They were, in fact, rebellious, seditious subjects, who presented a danger to the empire and they got what they deserved. Relative peace and harmony, they say, had existed in the Ottoman Empire between the state and religious minorities, until outside agitators, usually from the Russian Empire, sometimes American missionaries, aroused the nationalist and separatist passions of the Armenians.

Still, the denialist claim, despite the existential threat posed by these Armenians and their Russian allies to the survival of the empire, there was no intention on the part of the Young Turk government to eliminate Armenians as a people. That's one side of the debate. On the other side, many historians sympathetic to the Armenians, shied away from explanations that might place any blame on the victims of Turkish policies. Armenian writers and the majority of scholars defend the case that yes, there were massive deportations and massacres and they were ordered by and carried out by the Young Turk authorities, that these events constitute the first major genocide of the 20th century.

But for Armenians, because a complex or nuanced account of the background and causes of the genocide, seemed to them to concede ground to the deniers. Many Armenian scholars until recently have been reluctant to see any rationale, any way to understand the acts of the Young Turks. One great scholar, Armenian, said to me, Ronald, if you try to explain why the Young Turks did what they did, you will rationalize that event and in turn, you will justify it. When explanation is not offered, or sometimes when it's offered offhand, it usually is what we might call an essentialist argument.

That is the argument that, you don't have to explain this. Turks are those kind of people. They're the ones who employ massacre and systematic killing to maintain their imperial dominance, the terrible Turk. Or maybe related arguments, that it's their religion. It's Islam that is so violent. Or maybe nationalism. Nationalism, when you don't have an explanation, you don't know why something happened, it's nationalism. So, in other words, deep, indelible cultural characteristics are laying at the bottom of many of these interpretations. Now, the argument I'm going to try to make tonight is different. First of all, in my own research, I discovered that whatever else they were, the Young Turks, the ones who ordered these deportations and massacres, were never purely Turkish ethno-nationalists.

They were never religious fanatics. More accurately, they might be called Ottoman reformers, or you might say modernizers, in their fundamental self-conception. They were primarily state imperialists. They were empire preservers, rather than as Kemal Atatürk would be 10 years later, founders of an ethnic nation state. For instance, if you look at the map, there was no thought of this empire of giving up the Arab lands, of Palestine, of Yemen, that they still controlled, or even to eliminate totally their Christian and Jewish subjects. They even tried to gain areas in the Caucasus that were occupied by other nationalities. But, over time, the Young Turks came to believe that Muslims, particularly Turks, were the appropriate people to rule the empire.

That Muslims, particularly Turks, were the most trustworthy supporters of the Ottoman state, and they increasingly convinced themselves that egalitarian Ottomanism, that is, that all nationalities, religious groups should have equal rights, which had been a policy of reformers earlier in the empire, that such Ottomanism was a political fantasy. Moreover, later, the removal of the Armenians, and in the 1920s, the Greeks, would in fact lay the foundation for the relatively homogeneous Muslim Turkish state, which today occupies Anatolia, that peninsula, and is the current Turkish Republic. But that comes later. Kemal's ethno-nationalism attempt to create an ethnically homogeneous Turkish nation, though ultimately that too has been thwarted by the millions of Kurds who have now lived there and have moved into what was historic Armenia, that ambition itself to make a purely Turkish Republic, would be thwarted by these Kurds, who indeed are now in rebellion against the Turkish state.

Now, notice that what I want to set up here is a kind of difference between two kinds of states. On the one hand, we have what I call empire. Empires are states that have institutionalized difference built into the law, into the nature of the state. So different peoples in the Ottoman Empire had different rights and privileges. They were organized in what was called millets, or religious or ethnic communities. And all of those people, markedly differently, were in fact subordinate, inferior to the ruling millet, the ruling nation, namely Muslims, right? So empire is built on difference and the superiority of some over others. And the fact that some people are superior to others gives those superior people the right to rule over the inferior people. If you think of the example of the British in India, right? It's the British, Europeans, with their guns and railroads and so forth, that have the right, they think, to rule over hundreds of millions of brown-skinned Indians, right? Until those Indians learn to rule themselves. Empires think they have a mission civilisatrice, a civilizing, that's French, a civilizing mission to, in fact, rule over others.

That's very different from the way we imagine the nation state, at least in its ideal type. A nation state is built not on difference between subjects and those who subjugate them, right? But rather on the equality of all citizens, and in many nation states, homogeneity of the population, particularly in ethno nation states. So most people in France would be French, in Armenia today, Armenian, in Turkey, Turkish, and so forth. So on one side, difference, hierarchy, and so forth. On the other, the ideal, if not in practice, but ideal, of equality, horizontal equivalence, and homogeneity. This empire wanted to maintain the privilege of some over others, rather than make everyone equal as in a nation state, as would happen later.

Because the eventual deportations and the mass murder of the Armenians, and later in the 1920s, the expulsion of the Greeks, would result in the homogeneous population of Muslim Turks, Kurds, and Circassians, and the foundation of the Turkish National Republic. Very often the history of the genocide has either been forgotten totally, it's not taught in Turkish schools, or it's been subsumed into a story of the making of the Republic. This unique moment, indeed, which was the foundational crime on which the Republic was formed, has been obliterated from memory.

I believe, and to try to argue in the book, that there would have been no genocide without World War I. That there were alternatives to genocide, including the reform of 1914, had they not gone to war. I also show that even after the Young Turks made the alliance with the Germans, to join the central powers, right? Austro-Hungary, Germany, Ottoman Empire together, against the Entente, Britain, France, and Russia. Even after they had made that agreement, they still carried on secret negotiations with the British and with the Russians, that maybe we'll be on your side if you give us a deal. And indeed, Talaat Pasha went to Crimea. We all know where Crimea is nowadays, right? Went to Crimea, where he met the Tsar, Nicholas II, and the Foreign Minister, Sergey Sazonov, and said, give us a deal.

But the Russians insisted, no, you have to carry out the reforms of 1914. The Young Turks wouldn't do that, and they believed rightly that the Germans would not enforce it. And so they joined the Germans. Had that decision made differently, been made differently, they had reform been decided, had they been with the Entente instead of the Germans, this genocide would not have occurred. The massacres began in February, March, by May, so many massacres, 1915, had occurred that the British, French, and Russians issued a declaration and warned the Ottoman government that they would be held responsible for what was happening to the Armenians. In that diplomatic document, we have for the first time in modern history, the phrase crimes against humanity, used officially, and with the responsibility being placed on perpetrators, crimes against humanity.

And this was even before the worst occurrences, the worst killings of the genocide had even occurred. Why call this a genocide? What is a genocide? And why is that term so important to Armenians? The word genocide, of course, was invented by a Polish Jewish jurist, lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, during the Second World War. And it's a term that comes from Latin and Greek, meaning genos, people, and cide, side, killing, killing of a people.

It conjures up images, and it features in international law, as an instance of the most horrendous crime that can be committed by states against designated peoples. The term is so great that all kinds of states now are claiming they have suffered from a genocide. It almost seems like if you want to be a real modern nation state, you not only have to have an opera house and an air force, you also have to have a genocide.

Genocide is not the mass killing of people. There's mass killing of people in war, in famines, in all kinds of other, the great purges in Russia, the Holodomor in Ukraine. Genocide is not the mass killing of people, it is the mass killing of a people. It is the state initiated and dedicated policy of eliminating a whole cultural, ethno-religious, or if you want, racial group.

Genocide is therefore the crime of crimes. It not only murders physically people, but destroys civilization and culture. The Armenian genocide occurred with three prongs that I've outlined. There was dispersal, deportation. Armenians were not to constitute 5%, no more than 5% anywhere in the empire. It concerned physical murder, mass murder, massacres.

And it also, as we now know more and more, it concerned assimilation, forced Islamization of hundreds of thousands of people whose ancestors, whose descendants remain today.

When we look at this story, do we learn anything from it? Are there patterns here? Should we be looking for these kinds of affective dispositions of resentment, fear, anger, and eventually hatred?

Anger is a powerful emotion, as is fear. Anger is an emotion you feel when someone has done something to you. You might get hit in the face, then you have to act in certain ways. You might sulk away, you might demand an apology, you might punch him in the nose.

Fear, of course, is a powerful emotion and often results in irrational behavior. Anxiety is even more dangerous than fear. Anxiety is fear of an objectless future. Fear may have an object, a lion might be charging you.

Anxiety is about what you don't yet know about the future. And the Turks had that anxiety. And there's even a more powerful emotion than anger. If anger is what you feel towards someone because of what they've done to you, hatred is the emotion you feel not because of what they've done to you, but who they are.

And if it's who they are that's the problem, then the solution is to get rid of them, to eliminate them. The Turks had moved to hatred, to thinking of the Armenians as an existential threat to their future existence.

And therefore, they had to be eliminated.

I argue, and to try to argue in the book, that there would have been no genocide without World War I.

That there were alternatives to genocide, including the reform of 1914.

Had they not gone to war.

I also show that even after the Young Turks made the alliance with the Germans, to join the central powers, right?

Austria-Hungary, Germany, Ottoman Empire together, against the Entente, Britain, France, and Russia.

Even after they had made that agreement, they still carried on secret negotiations with the British and with the Russians.

That maybe we'll be on your side if you give us a deal.

And indeed, Talaat Pasha went to Crimea. We all know where Crimea is nowadays, right?

Went to Crimea, where he met the Tsar, Nicholas II.

And the Foreign Minister, Sergey Sazonov, and said, give us a deal.

But the Russians insisted, no, you have to carry out the reforms of 1914.

The Young Turks wouldn't do that, and they believed rightly that the Germans would not enforce it.

And so they joined the Germans.

Had that decision made differently, been made differently.

They had reform been decided.

Had they been with the Entente instead of the Germans.

This genocide would not have occurred.

The massacres began in February, March.

By May, so many massacres, 1915, had occurred.

That the British, French, and Russians issued a declaration.

And warned the Ottoman government that they would be held responsible for what was happening to the Armenians.

In that diplomatic document, we have for the first time in modern history.

The phrase crimes against humanity, used officially.

And with the responsibility being placed on perpetrators, crimes against humanity.

And this was even before the worst occurrences, the worst killings of the genocide.

Had even occurred.