In postgenocidal societies we live in the buildings, on the lands, and literally on top of the bones of those lost to mass violence. Like in other postgenocidal societies, economic and political power holders in the late Ottoman period and new Turkish Republic profited from the targeted dispossession and removal of some of its citizens. As recent scholarship on the Armenian Genocide and the larger destruction of Ottoman Christians has shown, the reasons for targeting Christians were multifaceted and interconnected. Christians were blamed for inviting the Great Powers in to meddle in the internal affairs of the empire and to threaten its territorial integrity. As the concept of citizenship was being articulated, they were constructed as a minority – a disloyal minority at that. They didn’t really belong and couldn’t really be trusted in a state that was increasingly viewed as Turkish (and, of course, Muslim). However, as with most genocides, there was a significant element of profiteering, which linked the central government, local authorities, and individuals on the ground. This is the important story that Dr. Kurt tells in this book.
Kurt’s book shows how the Armenian Genocide was a case in which, in his own words, “the state-orchestrated plunder of Armenian property immediately impoverished its victims” and that “therefore, it was simultaneously a condition for and a consequence of the genocide” (p. 1). In a meticulously researched study that draws on a wide range of archival collections in Turkey, Armenia, Lebanon, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany as well as a substantial assembly of memoirs, newspapers and periodicals, secondary sources, and interviews, Kurt constructs a microhistory of sorts that takes Aintab as its focus and allows readers to follow the dynamics of Armenian dispossession from the 1895 massacres to the genocide carried out during World War I, and into the Turkish Republic. Kurt subscribes neither to the idea that Ottoman Christians and Muslims had been locked in age-old primordial hatreds, nor to the image of a rosy coexistence across the ages. He does ask, however, how it was that a community like Aintab, where Muslims and Christians had coexisted relatively peacefully for so long, fell victim to the genocidal momentum that had begun to engulf places with Christian communities. He explores this by following the money, so to speak. Who profited from this and how?
In six chapters (not including the introduction or conclusion), Kurt traces unique aspects of this story, starting with how ethnoreligious conflict coalesced in the context of demographic and economic changes that took place in the nineteenth century. Christians sometimes benefited from ties to foreign powers and in certain places saw their fortunes rising. With treaties in the second half of the nineteenth century that allowed European powers greater influence in internal Ottoman affairs, resentment rose against Christians, and there was, in Kurt’s words, “a sense that external powers were working clandestinely with Christian minorities” (p. 29). It was against this backdrop that we must view the violence that spread throughout eastern Anatolia from 1894 to 1897, otherwise known as the Hamidian massacres. But while Christians did increase their wealth, as Kurt notes, “Armenians became only comparatively rich” (p. 38). Muslim “[e]nvy and resentment opened the door to a hate-mongering atmosphere” (p. 39), so when the massacres began further east, Aintab was soon swept up in the violence. Kurt explains that “each channel and physical space signifying the superiority of [the] Armenian community over Muslims eventually became an object of this extreme violence. The perpetrators’ focus of rage was initially economically valuable assets, such as shops and businesses in the market area, and the Armenian quarters” (p. 57). Although peace eventually returned to Aintab, it was tenuous.
The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 appeared to unite Christians, Muslims, Jews, and members of all ethnic groups across the empire. However, as Kurt notes, “In reality, a great change had taken place in the power dynamics, and the euphoria soon faded, bringing real problems to the surface” (p. 62). Political and economic decline heightened beliefs that Christians would benefit especially from the constitution. Relations deteriorated in Aintab, particularly with the massacres of Armenians in Adana in 1909, which coincided with the counterrevolution enacted by the sultan’s supporters. Armenians in Aintab began to prepare themselves, while in the meantime international political disasters suffered by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) mounted. Muslims boycotted Christian and Jewish businesses and “[a] coordinated campaign of atrocity propaganda, intended to heighten the stigmatization and consequent dehumanization of Ottoman Christians, was implemented following the routing experienced by the Ottomans in the Balkans” (p. 75). In this discourse, “non-Muslims were ‘sucking [the] blood of Muslims’” (p. 75), a trope that has been deployed against communities in many genocides. The Balkan Wars that ensued were humiliating and included acts of atrocious violence against Muslims. Christians were blamed for these defeats, and the reform package of 1914 that allowed European inspectors to govern these areas were, for many historians of the Armenian genocide, the last straw. Armenians and other Christians became nothing more than the “tool[s] of foreign states” (p. 77).
In genocide studies, scholars recognize that genocide most often takes place during war. War serves as the catalyst and the cover. Genocide is rarely Plan A of those who would become génocidaires, but war is both a spur to and shield for genocidal actions. This is true for the Ottoman context as well. Ottoman defeats on the battlefield heightened anti-Christian (particularly anti-Armenian) sentiments and how discriminatory measures were enacted against Armenians. However, as Kurt draws attention to the ways in which measures against Armenians transformed from strategic to genocidal, he notes that Aintab was an outlier, and asks why Armenians in Aintab were “spared for so long” (p. 87). Part of this had to do with the local governors, who rejected the attempts of local notables to slander Armenians. But eventually these local leaders had their way and were successful in getting the central government to replace those local officials who tried to keep the peace. One of Kurt’s central points is highlighted here – that the genocide was not just a result of state orders but also an interplay between central officials, local officials, and local elites, and, as he points out, those who had a material stake in the dispossession and permanent removal of Armenians.
In sum, the state wanted to remove Armenians from their lands and properties to settle Muslim immigrants and refugees. Locals wanted to remove Armenians from their lands and properties to profit from them. As Kurt puts it, “It is clear that the deportation depended on close coordination and collaboration between central authorities and various Aintab actors. In fact, administrative, political, local, and civilian agents proved far more efficient than the central authority. In this regard, Aintab is a microcosm of the CUP’s genocidal policies as they unfolded throughout the country” (p. 106).
The so-called Abandoned Property Laws, which came in the form of “a series of laws, decrees, and regulations” (p. 108), in May 1915, were enacted to ensure that the state and its chosen beneficiaries profited, and that Armenians would never be able to reclaim their properties at their real value, much less claim them at all. What is interesting to note here is how highly bureaucratized this genocide was. We think of the modernity of genocide in not only the modern conception of peoplehood but also the mechanisms for rounding up and executing groups en masse. But as Kurt shows, a key component of genocide is its material stakeholders. The laws, regulations, and practices that concerned what was to be done with so-called abandoned Armenian property illustrates this well. Armenians were never supposed to come home from their places of exile or return from the dead to claim these properties.
What happened to Armenian wealth? The state appropriated a great deal of it and sought to use it for its own purposes. Locals, too, did the same. As Kurt notes, “With the redistribution of Armenian properties, a new, wealthy Turkish-Muslim elite class emerged in Aintab after 1915” (p. 120), a process that continued into the next decade. Armenians facing deportation desperately tried to convert their possessions into cash before being deported and “Armenian neighborhoods … were transformed into a huge open bazaar” (p. 121). Alongside the more formal arena of dispossession, too, were “local actors close to the CUP club in Aintab [who] were active agents of this process” (p. 125). It was the district’s notables who organized this looting. Thus, the “process of redistributing Armenian properties illustrates the close relationship between CUP officials and local Muslim elites” (p. 141).
As if the process of dispossession was not troubling enough, the struggle Armenians faced for restitution after the war ended is equally disturbing. Armenians were subjected to a variety of factors that influenced their ability (or inability) to resume possession of their own properties, assets, and goods after the war. We should note that with the large number of Armenian deaths during the genocide, it was up to survivors and the descendants of victims to navigate this complicated process. The postwar occupation galvanized Muslims on the ground, who joined the groundswell of support for the independence movement led by Mustafa Kemal. At the same time that Armenian and other Christian survivors were beginning to return to their homes and working to reclaim their properties and other assets, a growing number of elite Muslim locals joined the nationalist movement, as they hoped to hang on to the properties they had usurped and avoid being brought to trial.
Kurt outlines how the British, then the French, for their own strategic and economic interests, abandoned their commitment to Armenian return and restitution, and it is striking how this unfolded. Due to British and French machinations over the Ottoman territories each sought to control, they left Aintab and made it clear that they didn’t want to upset the Muslims there, as they were looking toward Mosul at that point. When the British handed Aintab’s occupation over to the French, not only did this further animate local Muslims against Armenians (as they believed that “the real force behind the French occupation was the Armenians” (p. 162)) but they also witnessed French ineffectiveness and their lack of will to enforce restitution. The French were now more interested in Syria proper and Lebanon. They were not going to protect the Armenians who tried to return, as it turned out. Aintab became “a theater of war” (p. 165). It also became a focal point of Kemalist resistance and subsequently gained a unique place in the myth of the founding of the Turkish Republic.
Dr. Kurt’s last chapter before the conclusion reveals the legal maneuvering in which the newly becoming Turkish Republic and the other signatories to the Treaty of Lausanne engaged, and how surviving Armenians lost any hopes about returning home and reclaiming the properties they were forced to abandon. It was not only the result of a “complex legislative framework” (p. 167) from Ankara but also the desertion by France. In the meantime, Aintab’s newly wealthy “Turkish-Muslim class … consolidated its economic status by seizing” (p. 167) Armenian properties. Through a series of legal and diplomatic maneuvers, these earlier liquidation laws the CUP put forth in 1915 were reenacted in a different guise and allowed to let stand because France had turned its attention elsewhere.
Kurt closes his study of the genocide in Aintab by examining two things: the first is how perpetrators of the violence (including those who goaded authorities into extending deportation orders to Aintab) had “their own pecuniary motives” (p. 213). But this was only part of it. As Kurt notes, “Viewing the entirety of the process, the function of appropriation was as important as the individual purposes; huge numbers of people were bound together in a circle of profit that was at the same time a circle of complicity” (p. 213).
This work rejects the idea that local actors were passive agents of the Ottoman center. Instead, it shows the interplay between the center and local points in the empire. It highlights the class component, and ultimately shows how the dispossession of Armenians served to create and strengthen a “national” bourgeoisie in Aintab.
Readers may ponder what would Turkey be like today if it had not been constructed on the appropriation of wealth and death of so many of its people. Although Muslims in places like Aintab took over Armenian properties and businesses (and in some cases became – upon taking that wealth – big industrialists), Turkey really suffered from its lack of precisely those people who had made its economic base diverse. Kurt doesn’t say this, but his account makes us wonder – did the nationalist Turks shoot themselves in the foot when it came to rebuilding and constructing an economically viable republic?
This beautifully crafted, richly researched book tells a powerful story that is sure to interest a wide audience of specialists and nonspecialists alike.
