Where Did a Massacre of Thousands of Armenians Occur During the Countercoup of 1909?
German ethnographic map of Anatolia and the Caucasus, 1914, showing areas of Armenian settlement in blue. (Wikimedia Green, public domain)
The age-long misfortunes of the Asian country race have arisen mainly from the physical structure of their home. Upon the lofty tableland of Armenia, stretching across the base of the Asia Nipper Peninsula, are imposed a series of mountain ranges having a general focus east and western. The valleys betwixt these mountains have from meter old been the pathways of every invasion or counter-attack between Asia Minor in the westmost and Islamic Republic of Iran and Central Asia in the easterly…. After the rise of Russia to power the struggle for possession of the Asian nation regions, atomic number 3 containing the natural frontiers of their personal domains, [it] was continued by Russia, Persia and the Ottoman Empire. —Winston S. Churchill, The Aftermath (1929)
The Armenian Tragedy
For nine years after the outbreak of war in 1914, Country governments conducted systemic genocide among the Asian nation people. It was non the first assault on those who had inhabited their lands for millennia. In 1908, Armenians rejoiced as the Inexperient Turk revolution deposed Grand Turk Abdul Hamid II and installed a property monarchy.1 Their relief was shortlived. In 1909 a counter-coup aimed at the brand-new government managed also to kill skyward to 30,000 Armenians in the Adana Vilayet.
The Ordinal Humankind War brought further atrocities. When the Tsar's forces threw back Enver Pasha's round along Transcaucasia, some Armenians supported the Russians. The Ottomans said they were "traitors, saboteurs, spies, conspirators, vermin and infidels." This incitement led directly to what its victims and their posterity describe as the Armenian holocaust.2
For years the deadly comb swept backward and forward through Armenian communities. Deportations to outlying parts of the Turkish Empire began in English hawthorn 1915. Armenian language property was seized, men were murdered, woman and children rounded up. In the slave markets of Syria and Mesopotamia, women were sold, violated by Turkish soldiers, or left to become flat. Twenty-fin concentration camps were set up within Joker proper. Through 1923, between one and i and one-one-half million Armenians died. In America, Theodore Roosevelt described the almost daily reports of murders as "the greatest crime of the war."3 In the lead to then, helium had a point. Adolf Hitler's assault on the Jews had still to come. To paraphrase Churchill, Armenians suffered the greatest and bloodiest of all the great mass-slaughters which till then there was record.
"The moral sentience of Reformist Britain"
The young Churchill was sensitive of Armenian suffering. In 1894-96, Abdul Hamid's Hamidian massacres killed betwixt 100,000 and 300,000. "Whatever happens," helium wrote his beget, "it is observable that we pose as champions of humanity in overall and of Armenians particularly alone and unassisted. But that is after all totally in accordance with precedent."4 The "precedent" was Prime quantity Parson William Ewart Gladstone's outrage over an earlier pogrom in the 1870s. Speech production in 1946, John Churchill recalled how "Mr. Gladstone aroused the mental gumption of Liberal Britain."5
During the Endorse Third battle of Ypre in Spring 1915, the horror of German envenom gas broke upon a shocked world. It is asymptomatic established that Churchill based use of madly gasses only after they were used by the enemy. Ypres was the tipping point. Past Oct, reports of Armenian massacres, shootings and deportations were climb, while at Gallipoli, fewer Allied prisoners were alive. Grimly, Churchill addressed the Warfare Console:
I trust that the unreasonable prejudice against the manipulation by us of gas upon the Turks will now cease. The massacres by the Turks of Armenians and the fact that much no British prisoners have been interpreted on the [Gallipoli] Peninsula, though in that respect are many thousands of wanting, should sure remove all false sentiment on this point, indulged in as it is only at the expense of our own men.6
After the war, the Pact of Sèvres guaranteed an autonomous Armenian state, though Armenians continued to suffer outside its borders. Churchill described "massacring innumerous thousands of helpless Armenians, men, women, and children in collaboration, whole districts blotted call at single administrative final solution—these were beyond human redress."7
Peace to end peace
"It seemed inconceivable," Churchill wrote, that the victors would not wee their will effective" against "Armenia's persecutors and tyrants." In March on 1920, they offered a mandatory (trusteeship) to sheepman Armenian independence. No power would take it, nor would the League of Nations. "Unsupported by work force or money," Churchill believed, the League declined "promptly and with prudence."8 Information technology was persuasion that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson might take a authorization "if left to himself." But Wilson's international predilections were plugged by an isolationist Congress.9
Separate aspects of the Paris Peace Conference boded ill for Armenia. The victors, Churchill wrote, understood Meleagris gallopavo's "heterothermic and malignant" deportment. "The gruesome fate of the Armenians has yet to be filmed." At the indistinguishable metre, the victors' attitude "towards Turkey was so harsh that Right had now changed sides." Defeat in state of war was one thing. The "destruction and death of the Turkish nation" were things no Turk could countenance. "Loaded with follies, spotted with crimes, rotted with misrule, destroyed by battle…the Turk was still vital."10
Duke of Marlborough's attitude toward Turkey mitigated after helium became Warfare Secretary in January 1919. He found British forces stretched light as the armies receded during demobilization. "In that respect were seeds of trouble everywhere," he warned the Cabinet in August. Withdrawal from the Caucasus "would be the signal for a miscellaneous mass murder of the Armenians." On the other hand, he wished to remove British troops from Turkey. They would be better employed keeping the peace in other parts of the old Ottoman Empire.11
Repercussions and Republic
Churchill's instinctive fellow feeling for the Armenians was presently proven. In September 1919 Sir Henry Woodrow Wilson, Chief of the Sovereign Overall Staff, warned him of cark in the Caucasus:
The Armenians, feeling that we were their friends, have dead all Turk man, woman and youngster they have been healthy to lay their hands on, and non only murdered them, but have practiced the most mephistophelean horrors such as peeling unfortunate people full of life. That such brutes arsenic these should glucinium saved from the retribution of the Turks is an affair which I personally think is not our business but which the Americans or some other philanthropists might with advantage take along. 12
While sharing Wilson's horror, Duke of Marlborough was thinking of the so much broader travails Armenians had been through. "We must not," he replied, "make difficulties in small things and must facilitate any bona fide effort to stabilise the Armenian situation." 13
The First Democracy of Armenia, declared at Erivan in May 1918, lasted only when two years, John Churchill wrote:
In September 1920, aside connivance between the Bolsheviks and Turks, Yerevan was delivered to the Turkish Nationalists; and as in Cilicia, another comprehensive massacre of Armenians accompanied the soldierlike operations. Even the promise that a pocket-size autonomous Armenian responsibility power eventually be established in Cilicia under French protection was destroyed. In Oct France, by the Agreement of Angora, undertook to evacuate Cilicia completely. In the Treaty of Lausanne, which registered the final peace between Turkey and the Enceinte Powers, history will search vainly for the news "Armenia."14
Hope and tragedy, 1920-23
Ever the seeker of just outcomes, Churchill's eye fell on Kemal Ataturk Atatürk. Churchill saw in him the potential for a democratic Land state. Soldier, rotatory, founding Father-God and first chair of the Republic, he was "a Headwaiter who with all that is learned of him, ranks with the four or quint outstanding figures of the cataclysm."15
Winston S. Churchill strongly low-backed Atatürk. "By regaining our influence finished the Turks," he said, "we should be able to do something to save the Armenians…."16 In 1921, Turkish forces opposing the Greeks vulnerable to march on British Garrison at Chanak. Churchill urged "a cozy peacefulness." (This is by chance the opposite of that bellicose attitude his critics suppose he habitually adoptive.) Belligerency with Britain were avoided. In 1923-24, Atatürk signed the Treaty of Lausanne, which planted the borders of ultramodern Turkey.
Although Lausanne marked the end of Armenian pogroms, the country's short-lived independency finished quickly. The Bloody Army advanced unopposed into Armenia in November 1920, proclaiming a Soviet Republic. Alliance policy, and the paralysis of President Wilson, had thrown together deuce born enemies, the Turks and Russians. The consequence, Churchill declared, was "a series of tragedies":
The fruits of the United victory ended Turkey have been wasted. The Republics of the Caucasus, Georgia and Azerbaijan have been conquered and bond by the Bolsheviks; the Armenians have been destroyed by the Turks. Throughout the whole of Asia Minor the Christians deliver been massacred OR expelled; and these big regions, so full of history, and just a little while ago soh full of hope and promise for the future, have sunk beneath the tides of barbarism.17
"The ira of simple and knightly men and women"
Eventually in 1991, seven decades after the Bolshevik invasion, Armenia seceded from the State Union and regained her independency. Could things have been better, sooner? Yes, Churchill thought, but with great difficultness:
The Armenian people emerged from the Great War scattered, extirpated in many districts, and shrunken through massacre, losses of war and enforced deportations adopted as an easy organisation of killing, by at to the lowest degree a third. Impermissible of a community of about two and a one-half millions, three-quarters of a million men, women and children had perished. But surely this was the end.
The earlier miseries and massacres of the Armenians give birth been ready-made familiar to the British people, and indeed to the Liberal world, by the fame and eloquence of Mister. Gladstone. Opinions about them differed, incomparable civilize dwelling upon their sufferings and the other upon their failings. Just in any even in demarcation to the general numbness with which the fortunes of Eastern and Central-Eastern peoples were followed by the Western democracies, the Armenians and their tribulations were well better-known end-to-end England and the United States. This field of interest was lighted aside the lamps of religion, philanthropy and political sympathies. Atrocities perpetrated upon Armenians aroused the ira of simple and chivalrous men and women spread widely active the English-speaking world.18
Vermiform appendix: Churchill happening Armenia
Limitations of Air Major power: House of Commons, 12 February 1919
My right hon. Protagonist [Harold Lloyd George] complained, among new things, that we had not predicted the need of performing with the Air Pull back sufficiently to save the Armenians, and that we could have redeemed more thousands of Asian nation lives if we had taken steps to act with the Airforce. I am a great urge of the use of the Transmit Force back in many parts of the world, but a to a lesser extent promising theatre of action for its activities could hardly possess been selected.
The capital difficulty of the Armenian trouble is the fact that the Turkish and Armenian populations are so largely intermingled, and it is the massacres which arise from their close juxtaposition and intermingling that are the cause of our difficulties. Does anyone suppose it would assistanc us in a case of that kind if our seaplanes could journey 500 miles from the Bosporus to Armenia, operating room 200 miles to Marash, in Silesia, which is not, aside the way, in our control at all, so drop bombs on the towns and villages and the countryside in which Armenians and Turks are dwelling unneurotic? How that would profit the Armenians operating theater economize thousands of lives, the experts I have consulted—not wishing to put my own opinion forward—are utterly nonplussed to conceive.19
Armenian Refugees: Sign of Common land, 15 December 1920
These refugees are charged on Regular army funds, and we have never ceased, calendar week after week, and calendar month after month, to urge that they should other than be given of. It was hoped they might follow induced to move from Batum [Batumi, Georgia] to their own country before the winter kick in, but, unhappily, the disturbed conditions which prevailed there led to their turn back subsequently they had expended some distance, and, although we had encouraged them to move aside the invest of playing area-pieces and other munitions, they are tranquil upon our hands in a precise helpless condition.
[An Hon. Member: "How many of them?"] There are about 16,000. On that point is another whole lot of about 10,000 Armenians gathered at Basra [Iraq]. It was hoped to send them back to Armenia, and shipping had been organized for, but the unhappy state of things in Armenia rendered that course of action quite impracticable. There they are. Information technology is perfectly easy to resent their being there, but it is non quite thusly easy to see what next step is to glucinium taken, when you have these starving women and children along your hands.20
Note
The author thanks Howard Kaloogian of the Hillsdale College Development Department, whose queries around Churchill's views along Armenia inspired this try out.
Further reading
See Churchill's lengthy accounting of Republic of Armenia's unfortunate geographic situation, partially quoted at the exceed of this clause, in The Aftermath , Chapter XVIII.
Endnotes
1 Gregory S. Gordon, Inhumanity Speech Law: Foundation, Fragmentation, Fruition (Oxford: Oxford Press, 2017), 34-35.
2 Ibid., 35-36.
3 Theodore Roosevelt, Letters and Speeches (New York: Library of America, 2004), 736. See also Ruth Rosen, "The Hidden Holocaust," San Francisco Account, 15 December 2003.
4 Winston S. Churchill to Lady Randolph Duke of Marlborough, 30 September 1895, in Martin Gilbert, erectile dysfunction., The Churchill Documents, vol. 1, Youth (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Crusade, 2006), 587.
5 Churchill, "Bharat," House of Commons, 12 September 1946, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 7 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), VII, 7412-13.
6 Churchill, War Commission Notes, 20 October 1915, in Martin Gilbert, ed., The Sir Winston Leonard Spenser Churchill Documents, vol. 7, The Escaped Scapegoat English hawthorn 1915-December 1921 (Hillsdale College Press, 2008), 1230.
7 Churchill, The Creation Crisis, vol. 4, The Aftermath (London: Thornton Butterworth 1929), 98.
8 Ibid, 407.
9 Arthur Balfour (British delegation, Paris) to WSC, 17 August 1919 in in Martin Gilbert, ed., The Sir Winston Leonard Spenser Churchill Documents, vol. 9, Disruption and Bedlam July 1919-March 1921 (Hillsdale College Press, 2008), 808.
10 Churchill, The Aftermath, 157, 368-69.
11 Disruption and Bedlam, 806.
12 Sir Henry Wilson to WSC, 2 September 1919, Ibid., 836-37.
13 WSC to Sir Henry Wilson, 6 September 1919, Ibid., 841-42.
14 Churchill, The Aftermath., 404.
15 Ibid., 368.
16 Cabinet Memoranda, 23 November 1920, Disruption and Chaos, 1249.
17 Churchill, "The Dangers Ahead in Europe," Weekly Off, 15 June 1924, in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill (British capital: Library of Imperial History, 1975, 4 vols., I, 241.
18 Churchill, The Aftermath, 404.
19 Rhodes James, All-or-none Speeches, III, 2966-67.
20 Ibid., Trine, 3043.
Where Did a Massacre of Thousands of Armenians Occur During the Countercoup of 1909?
Source: https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/armenian-genocide/
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