Interview with Dr. Brad Dennis
Dr. Dennis, the extermination of the Muslim minority in the course of the Bulgarian struggle for independence is considered one of the best documented ethnic cleansings of the late 19th century. Western diplomats, above all French and British consuls, were horrified by the massacres, mass rapes, looting, expropriations and expulsions of Muslims and Jews. This trauma still lingers in the collective memory of the Turks today. At least as horrific scenes took place at the time of the Russian-Armenian annexation of Eastern Anatolia during the First World War. The memory of this time of horror is still very much alive today, especially in Turkish Eastern Anatolia. Why has this dark chapter of the Armenian reign of terror in Eastern Anatolia never really been taken into account in Western research?
I cannot speak for the academic literature outside the US and the UK. I am not very familiar with researching and writing in German or French on this topic. There are three main reasons for this that come to mind.
Firstly, the First World War has been overshadowed in public discourse by the Second World War. Americans don’t talk that much about the First World War and don’t know that much about it either. In contrast, Americans are fascinated by Hitler and see him as the ultimate supervillain in history. The Jewish Holocaust is taught very thoroughly in schools. In contrast, Americans don’t talk much about Turks and even less about Armenians and don’t even know much about them. The average American has to work very hard to find out about the late Ottoman Empire.
Secondly, Westerners who know something about the late Ottoman Empire tend to see Armenians in the late Ottoman period as the Jews in Nazi Germany. The Jewish Holocaust is so much a part of the discourse in the West that it takes considerable time and effort for the average citizen to be able to distinguish between the Holocaust and other episodes of mass murder. Jews are rightly seen as collective victims of collective Nazi aggression. The lay view of the late Ottoman Empire is one that emphasizes the Ottoman state and the Muslim peoples as collective aggressors who exterminated unwelcome Greek and Armenian minorities. While there should be no doubt that parts of the Ottoman state and some Muslim groups carried out horrific violence against Christian minorities, Greek and Armenian groups, with the help of Russia and other Western states, also acted as aggressors with the aim of expanding the territory controlled by Greeks and Armenians at the expense of the Muslim inhabitants.
Third, the Armenian and Greek diaspora in the US is much larger than the Turkish and Kurdish diaspora in the US. Armenians and Greeks have influenced the narrative in such a way that their pain and suffering is presented to American audiences to a much greater extent and in English. I think this is a great and welcome advance in the West, as it is objective research based on good evidence, rather than one-sided, highly selective nationalist narratives. We should recognize the massive, terrible suffering of Christians in the late Ottoman Empire. But we should also recognize the suffering of Muslim groups.
In an article published in 2019 in the renowned Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, you mentioned the Balkans as a kind of testing ground for Armenian militias. Why the Balkan region in particular?
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Balkans were a zone of geopolitical conflict between Great Britain, France, Italy, Austria and Russia. It was a geographical hub where the geopolitical interests of several political powers converged. It has been an area of conflict and revolutionary activity since the early 19th century. At the beginning of the century, the major European powers were in a race to gain as much territory in the world as possible. They saw the Ottoman Empire weakening and tried to grab as many pieces of the cake as possible. As too many imperial interests clashed in the Balkans, they had to find creative and indirect ways of gaining power. The delicate political situation in the Balkans in the late 1800s made it an area of political activity, particularly those that challenged the Ottoman state. Armenian revolutionary groups hoped to win over revolutionaries from the Balkans to their cause in Eastern Anatolia. They hoped to build links with Russia, which they saw as the leading country that would help them achieve greater autonomy within the Ottoman state or even independence.
What parallels can be drawn with Eastern Anatolia?
The Balkans and Eastern Anatolia were both areas where Russian interests and influence increased in the 1800s. Both areas were affected by the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878 – although the Balkans were more affected. Christian minorities lived in both areas, where nationalist, separatist tendencies were on the rise, encouraged by Russian and Western thinking. Both were target areas for American and British missionaries, who not only acted as evangelists, but also spread political ideas and campaigned for special protection and status, especially for Protestant converts. They were both strategic regions on the Black Sea. They were both border areas. The Balkans were a border with Austria and eastern Anatolia a border with Persia and the Caucasus.
Where are there significant differences?
Eastern Anatolia was largely inhabited by Kurdish groups, who for a long time acted semi-independently of the Ottoman state and had a very different socio-political dynamic to the Muslims in the Balkans. There were not as many Christians living in Eastern Anatolia as in other parts of the country. The Christian groups were not so diverse either. While Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks, Macedonians, Romanians and other Christian ethnolinguistic groups lived together in the Balkans, in Eastern Anatolia there were mainly Armenians and Assyrians, who had a rather small population and inhabited parts of the south-east and Iraq. The Christians in the Balkans were largely Chalcedonian Eastern Orthodox, to whom Russian Orthodoxy was doctrinally aligned, while the Armenians were largely Monophysite Oriental Orthodox, who were considered heterodox and inferior by the Russian Orthodox clergy.
Armenian organizations, such as the Dashnaksutiun, Armenakan or Hnchaks, repeatedly come to the fore as actors or driving forces. The Ottoman leadership of the time often referred to these Armenian activists disparagingly as “chettes” (Turkish: Çete), which means gangs. Turkish historians often adopted this term without reflection, which led to this narrative persisting to this day. To what extent were these Armenian structures “gangs”?
The First World War and the subsequent wars in Anatolia and Russia were full of extremist philosophies and activities of all kinds, which led to all kinds of atrocities. Between 1915 and 1923, the Dashnaks had not been able to completely control all the units claiming to be Dashnaks. Some Dashnaks were more conciliatory and pragmatic, while others were more extreme and violent. At the time of the Fergana massacres, Russia was in the midst of a terrible civil war that lasted five years between 1917 and 1923 and claimed as many victims as the First World War. The degree of unity not only among the Dashnaks but also among other revolutionary and military groups is highly questionable. There was a massive power vacuum, which the Bolsheviks were eventually able to fill, as they had a somewhat better organized control over a center of power than other groups. Similarly, Anatolia was in the midst of a civil war in which many different groups were vying for power and there was great uncertainty as to which territory was or would be controlled and who exactly was in power.
In view of the very small Armenian population in Eastern Anatolia, the establishment of an Armenian state in a region with an overwhelming Muslim majority seems somewhat utopian. Would this state have been viable and were there no movements that pursued more realistic goals?
I think it is very possible that a larger Armenian state could have been founded that would have extended deep into eastern Anatolia and as far as Cilicia and the Mediterranean, possibly even as far as Syria and Lebanon. The main reasons why this did not happen were the lack of support from the major powers after the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution and the civil war in Russia, and the emergence of the modern nation state of Turkey, which regained control over Eastern Anatolia, the Eastern Aegean and Thrace. A country like today’s Turkey would be much smaller if the Treaty of Sèvres had been implemented in 1920 and the great powers had continued the struggle for the division of the Ottoman Empire.
Bear in mind that there were hardly any Jews living in the area that today forms modern Israel during the First World War. However, direct British control over the region under the Mandate for Palestine enabled massive Jewish immigration and eventually the creation of the fully independent state of Israel in 1948. With the support of the USA and the West, it fended off attacks from neighboring countries in 1948-1949 and 1967, preserved its integrity and expanded its territory. And Armenians idealized parts of Eastern Anatolia and Cilicia as a deeply historical motherland that once experienced glorious times of independent Armenian kingdoms, similar to how many Jews saw Israel.
In that said article you preferred the term cultural cleansing rather than the more common one of ethnic cleansing. What is the difference?
I say cultural cleansing for three main reasons. Firstly, Muslims are not an ethnic group. Anyone can convert to Islam, and people of all races and ethnolinguistic backgrounds have converted. The Hemshin Armenians living in north-eastern Anatolia converted to Islam at the beginning of the 17th century. They incorporated the Armenian language into their Islamic practice. According to Ottoman law and custom, they were equal to other Muslims. Between 1895 and 1924, tens of thousands of Armenians converted to Islam, gave themselves Muslim names and stopped emphasizing their Armenian identity so as not to be forced to leave the country. This option was always granted to them by the Muslims. During the First World War, even the most hostile Muslims spared the lives of Christians when they converted to Islam, erasing and forgetting their Christian religious identity and, as a rule, their Armenian ethnolinguistic identity. It is estimated that between 500,000 and 3 million people of Armenian descent live in Turkey today. Compare this with the Jews in Europe during the Second World War. There was no way for them to convert to Christianity or renounce Judaism to save their lives. According to the dictates of National Socialism, the Jews were biologically separated on the basis of their DNA, and nothing could be done to change that. Compare this also to the blacks in the southern states of the United States before the civil rights era. They could not gain the same rights as white Southerners in any form, simply because of the color of their skin. Even people who had a mixture of white and black ancestors could not achieve equality. Homer Plessy, who was only one-eighth black, was forced by order of the Supreme Court to sit in a separate train car designated for “colored people” simply because he had a percentage of black ancestry that made him appear partially black. There was no possibility of changing culture in order to gain rights. This ruling paved the way for racial segregation in large parts of the USA, even though slavery had been abolished. In the Ottoman Empire, it was possible to change culture (which was undoubtedly very difficult) in order to gain privileges. Those who converted to Islam and appeared to be sincere converts could more easily gain equal treatment, regardless of their ancestry or skin color.
Secondly, the term “ethnic” refers to the DNA structure of peoples. Armenians, Kurds and Turks had strongly overlapping DNA. They intermingled over the course of history and probably did not differ much in appearance during the Ottoman period.
Thirdly, many Armenians retained an Armenian identity even though they spoke Turkish or Kurdish as their mother tongue. Many Armenians in western Anatolia and Istanbul did not even speak Armenian, but only Turkish. There are many documents written in Turkish but with Armenian letters, which shows that many Ottoman Armenians were native Turkish speakers.
Let’s come back to the insight of your specialist article, which was published in the journal Muslim Minority Affairs in 2019. They hypothesize that if an Armenian state had been founded in Eastern Anatolia, it is very likely that similar, very large-scale cultural cleansing of the Muslim majority population would have taken place. What solid evidence is there to support this?
I think there are good reasons to believe that if the Armenians had succeeded in claiming the territory allocated to them in the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, further conflicts would have broken out between Muslims and Christians and that the Armenians, with the support of Russia and other major powers, could have used these conflicts as a pretext for the forced resettlement of the Muslims. As far as I can tell, I’m also not sure if there was a mechanism in traditional Armenian social structures that allowed Muslims equal rights if they converted to Armenian Orthodox Christianity. I haven’t really heard of many cases, especially because there is a massive social taboo against Muslims converting from Islam to another religion. In 1920, there was extreme mistrust between Muslims and Armenians in Eastern Anatolia, which took on paranoid characteristics. It was a tragic time. I wish people had found a way to live and thrive together despite the religious and ethnolinguistic differences. But the general view was that the land should either be occupied by Armenian Christians (remember that the Armenians made little to no exceptions for the Assyrian Christians and did not support their cause) or by Muslims. You couldn’t have it both ways. Of course, there were people who believed in equality and a Muslim-Christian colonized state, but these people were overwhelmed by polarized feelings and warmongering factions advocating an either/or narrative.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Italian traveler and adventurer Luigi Villari described the city of Revan, the capital of Armenia today known as Yerevan, as a typical Muslim city with a clear majority of Muslims. Today, only one mosque is known to still exist in Yerevan. The number of Muslims can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Did the Muslims in today’s Armenia suffer a similar fate to the Bulgarian Muslims in the Balkans?
Luigi Villari’s description is very fascinating. There is no doubt that the areas that make up today’s Armenia were once inhabited by Muslim groups. With the Russian occupation at the beginning of the 19th century, however, the population gradually began to thin out. Only around 800 Muslims still live in Armenia today. Muslims still live in large parts of the Balkans. Around eight percent of the population in Bulgaria is Muslim. Albania is largely Muslim. Around 25 % of North Macedonia is Muslim. Kosovo is almost entirely Muslim and Bosnia and Herzegovina is over 50% Muslim. In Greece, the proportion of Muslims is around 2%, with many of these Muslims having recently immigrated from Pakistan and Afghanistan. The proportion of Muslims in Georgia is 10 %. Armenia is a country that is almost surrounded by Muslim countries and in which very few Muslims live. In fair comparison, there are currently extremely few Christians living in modern Turkey, only around 160,000. There are hardly any Christians in Eastern Anatolia and not even any cultural traces of the Armenians and Assyrians who once lived there. However, small numbers of Assyrians still inhabit parts of south-eastern Anatolia. A few years ago, for example, an Assyrian Christian woman was elected mayor in Mardin. Many Eastern Anatolians have Armenian ancestors who converted to Islam to escape persecution.
Another interesting case is the Kars Oblast, which was under Russian control from 1878 to 1918. In 1886, the Armenian population accounted for 21% of the total, and in 1917 it was 32%. The Armenians were a growing population during this period, but the Muslims were not driven out of the region, it seems.
In other words, the founding of the present-day state of Armenia can also be used as further evidence for your hypothesis.
Yes, indeed. Not only that, but also Nagorno-Karabakh, where hundreds of thousands of Azeris were displaced by Armenians in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War of 1988-1994, killing some 16,000 people and wounding 30,000.
What role did the figureheads of the Armenian struggle for independence play in the cultural cleansing of Muslims in the Balkans and Eastern Anatolia?
Personalities such as Andranik and others laid the ideological and tactical foundations for Armenian revolutionary parties that wanted to establish an independent Armenian state through militancy. Andranik had led several guerrilla movements against Kurdish groups and the Ottoman Empire in Sasun in the mid-1890s and 1904. He travelled through eastern Anatolia, the Balkans and the territories controlled by Russia, helping to organize resistance against the Ottomans. There is evidence that he helped Armenians in the Ottoman Empire to arm themselves and led uprisings, including Armenian volunteer units that were allied with Russia in the First World War. In May 1915, he led over 1,200 armed men from Salmas, Iran, and with the help of Russian troops marching in from the north, helped to occupy a large part of the province of Van. He was one of the main perpetrators of the Armenian uprising in Van in 1915. During this uprising, many Muslim populations were wiped out. According to Ottoman reports, Andranik and the French colonel Morel forced around 300 Muslim civilians into a church in Erzurum in 1918 and burned them alive. And that was just one of the acts of violence against Muslims committed by Armenian revolutionaries in Erzurum and the surrounding area in 1918. Hundreds of other Muslims were slaughtered in massacres orchestrated by Armenian activists with the help of Western aid workers. Of course, these are just assertions. Andranik was never formally brought to trial. But there are many reports of his war crimes against the Muslim population.
When did the large-scale extermination campaign against the Muslim population in eastern Anatolia begin?
The large-scale campaign to exterminate the Muslims in eastern Anatolia began in March 1915. The Ottomans had entered the First World War on the side of the Central Powers in October 1914. From this point on, Armenian revolutionaries had begun planning when exactly they wanted to start uprisings throughout Eastern Anatolia. The policy of revolt and rebellion was something that the revolutionaries had used in the Balkans, especially in the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878 and in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. In many respects, the Armenian revolutionaries copied what had been done in the Balkans and put it into practice in Eastern Anatolia.
Did the cultural cleansing of the Muslims in Eastern Anatolia follow a certain systematic pattern?
To be honest, it’s difficult to say. Some patterns can be recognized, but the number of deaths is so large that there were probably many different types of death. Armenian volunteers fighting for Russia and revolutionaries rounded up and massacred Muslim villagers on many occasions. What happened in Eastern Anatolia during the First World War was a policy of revenge and massacre. Massacres committed by Armenians against Muslims prompted Muslim robber gangs and tribes to take revenge on Armenians, which in turn prompted Armenian robber gangs to commit forced relocations and murders. The tensions from the violence of the 1890s continued and were reignited by the First World War, but on a much larger scale.
What is the estimated number of civilian casualties on the Muslim side?
I’m not sure what the number of civilian casualties is as opposed to military casualties. Citing Justin McCarthy’s estimates of the loss of Muslim life in Eastern Anatolia between 1912 and 1922, the Van Vilayet lost about 194,000 Muslims or 62% of the Muslims living there, the Bitlis Vilayet 170,000 or 42%, the Erzurum Vilayet 248,000 or 31%, the Diyarbakir 158,000 or 26%, the Mamuretulaziz Vilayet 89,000 or 16% and the Sivas Vilayet 180,000 or 15%. That is a total of around 1,039,000 Muslims who lost their lives in Eastern Anatolia alone during the First World War. Truly staggering figures. Disease and famine played a major role in the loss of human life. Iran lost about 2 million people to famine during the First World War, including Armenians, other Christians and Muslims, and the country remained neutral during the war. But warfare, including the massacre of civilians by ruthless bandits, was undoubtedly a major factor in the death toll of the First World War. The Armenian revolutionaries and Russia were most active in the border provinces of Van, Bitlis and Erzurum, which is reflected in the statistics. We have every reason to believe that they were actively trying to thin out the Muslim population in preparation for the establishment of an independent Armenian state in Eastern Anatolia or an autonomous Armenian-controlled province under the control of Russia or perhaps other Entente powers. The death toll among Ottoman Armenians and Assyrians in eastern Anatolia was roughly the same. It was a maelstrom of death and violence during this dark period of the First World War.
How well have these crimes against Muslims been documented, and how are they perceived by the public today?
The Ottoman archives, British consular reports and foreign travelers document crimes against Muslims. Armenian reports and records also show the planning, activity and ideology of the Armenian revolutionaries. Census and population data show an astonishing number of deaths during and after the First World War, both Muslim and Christian. Famine, massacres, conflicts, war injuries and other hostilities led to mass deaths. Eastern Anatolia was one of the worst affected regions during the First World War. The public must know that not only Armenians died. Muslims and other Christian groups also suffered mass casualties. There is a general lack of knowledge in the American public about mass Muslim suffering. I would be in favor of a major translation project of Ottoman documents into English to highlight these sufferings. Many feel that Ottoman documents are inherently biased and unobjective. What we read in these documents were secret messages intended only for the government. They were not intended for publication to the general public. The atrocities committed by the Armenian revolutionaries against the Muslim civilian population are also described in detail in foreign documents.
What role did the Russian Empire play in this context? We must not forget that Tsarist Russia, as an enemy of the Ottoman Empire, had invaded deep into Eastern Anatolia and that these crimes were committed before the eyes of the Russian occupiers.
Russia had great ambitions for expansion since the 1500s. Middle of the In the 17th century, the Black Sea was targeted, and under Catherine the Great, expansion in the Black Sea region began. When the Russians came into contact with the Muslims, they did not necessarily try to expel them as long as they could control the land and bring the Muslim population under their control. To the extent that the Russians perceived the Muslims as a problem, they took steps to thin out the population. This was the case with the Crimean Tatars and the Circassians at the end of the 17. or middle of the 18th century. Many of them fled from the northern Caucasus to Turkey. Many Turks today have grandparents and great-grandparents whose mother tongue was Circassian. Today’s Russia is made up of many different ethnic groups, including those who had previously converted to Islam, such as Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens and groups in Dagestan. In the case of Eastern Anatolia, however, Russia had every ambition to take over the region and incorporate it into Russia, either as an Armenian client state or as a Russian province.
Were there ever any consequences? Were those responsible at the time held accountable?
Not in a conventional courtroom, at least not that I know of. In a more ideal world, the criminals could have been filtered out, arrested, tried and sentenced, while the remaining peaceful Christians and Muslims could have continued to live side by side. But Russian and Armenian criminals slaughtering Muslim civilians, most of whom were defenseless, led to a fierce violent reaction from militant Muslims who eventually eradicated Armenian identity and culture through mass conversions to Islam or organized deportation, forced flight and killing of Christian groups in Eastern Anatolia.
Why has the topic of mezalim still not really caught on in Western research? What do you think?
During the First World War, the Ottoman Empire was an enemy of Great Britain, France, the USA and Russia. I think this is an important reason why there is still a reluctance to show compassion for the plight of Muslims in Eastern Anatolia during this period. Compare this with the Muslims in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. At that time, the context had changed considerably. Radical nationalism and Soviet communism were seen as the far greater threat to the West at this time. The West saw Yugoslav Muslims as natural allies in promoting Western-backed liberal democracy in the region and in resisting any attempts to spread Serbian nationalism or even revive the Soviet-Russian sphere of influence in the Balkans. The stories of suffering of Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims in the 1990s resonated far more in the West than Serbian nationalist narratives. It should also be noted that the West has been reluctant to condemn Turkey or Turkish nationalism as a whole. This is mainly due to the fact that Turkey was an important ally of the West on the front line during the Cold War and is still an important country in the West’s efforts to shape the Middle East. And now that the Russian attack on Ukraine is underway, Turkey is once again playing an important role for Western interests. Although the Turks were the center of attention in the Western media at the end of the 19. and beginning of the While the 20th century portrayed the Nazis as ruthless criminals, the image changed drastically during the Second World War. Turkey remained neutral during the war, which was particularly detrimental to the Axis powers, and finally joined the war against Germany in February 1945 – something of a formality. It joined NATO in 1952. I think these actions have been instrumental in warming the West’s opinion of Turkey, but they have ultimately not done much to change the West’s widespread negative attitude towards the Ottoman Empire.
Dr. Dennis, thank you for this interview.