Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: the Great War in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 442 pp., $32.00.

Ronald Grigor Suny, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: a History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 520 pp., $35.00.

Thomas de Waal, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 312 pp., $29.95.

THIS YEAR, Turkey moved its Gallipoli anniversary commemoration, traditionally marked on April 25—the day the Allies landed on the peninsula just west of Istanbul—to April 24. April 24, of course, is the day on which Armenians around the world have traditionally commemorated the slaughter of their forefathers by the Ottoman Turkish government. That day, in 1915, the police in Constantinople rounded up some 250 Armenian leaders for deportation and death. This act was followed by systematic mass deportations and massacres.

This year was the centenary of both World War I events. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with his wonted crudity and cynicism, moved the Gallipoli remembrance by a day in order to overshadow the Armenian commemoration and divert international attention away from the Turks’ crime against humanity, considered by most historians to be the first genocide of the twentieth century.

All Turkish governments since World War I have denied Turkish responsibility for the mass murder and, indeed, have usually denied that it actually took place, explaining that a much smaller number of Armenians had died (much, incidentally, as Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian “president,” in his PhD thesis claimed that “only” several hundred thousand Jews had died during the Holocaust). Instead, Turkish governments have claimed that the Armenians, a disloyal people, had rebelled against the country and tried to stab it in the back during the war; that the Armenian victims were the result of clashes between armed rebels and the empire’s security forces; and that, if massacres occurred, they were the doing of overzealous local officials and/or Kurdish tribesmen, rather than a product of the policy of the central government, which had merely ordered the removal of Armenians from war zones.

Few, if any, of the foreign dignitaries who attended Erdogan’s festivities at Gallipoli, including princes Charles and Harry from Great Britain and the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand, whose troops had participated in the landings on the peninsula, were probably aware of the grim irony that undercut the Turkish celebrations. This irony was embodied in the story, in which Gallipoli and the genocide intersect, of Captain Sarkis Torossian. His war memoir, From Dardanelles to Palestine, which had originally appeared back in Boston in 1947, was now available in Turkish, published in 2013 and edited by a Turk, Professor Ayhan Aktar of Istanbul’s Bilgi University.

Torossian was an Armenian from Everek, near Kayseri, who, unusually for an Armenian, managed to enroll in and graduate from Turkey’s military academy just before World War I. In 1915 he was stationed at Gallipoli, where he commanded artillery that badly mauled the British fleet in the Dardanelles. For his service, he was personally awarded the Ottoman State War Medal by Enver Pasha, the Ottoman war minister who, alongside Talaat Pasha, the interior minister, was one of the main architects of the Armenian genocide. During the following months, Torossian appealed to Enver to intercede and save his family. (Officially, close relatives of Armenian officers were supposed to be spared though, in fact, many were deported and killed.) Torossian’s father and mother were among those murdered, and his sister Bayzar and fiancée, Jemileh, both died of disease in the Syrian deserts (as did hundreds of thousands of Armenian women and children during the forced treks southward or in the concentration camps around Deir al-Zor). Jemileh, incidentally, was, it appears, an Armenian who had been found wandering near her home at the age of two and had been “adopted” by an Ottoman Arab general during the earlier major bout of Turkish massacres of Armenians, in 1894–1896, and had been brought up as a Muslim. Later, in 1918, Torossian, understandably embittered, switched sides and deserted to the British army during General Edmund Allenby’s conquest of northern Palestine. He subsequently served in an Armenian unit in the French Army during the Franco-Turkish hostilities in Cilicia. He emerged from his military career with a fistful of Ottoman, British and French medals.

What Torossian’s story shows is that Christian soldiers, when allowed to, fought in the Ottoman Army against the Allies in World War I (though almost all the Armenian soldiers, shortly after the war began, were disarmed and immediately murdered by the Turks or assigned to grueling labor battalions, where they were eventually murdered or died, by design, of exposure, malnutrition and disease). This story also shows that Armenians like Torossian had good—indeed, excellent—reasons to turn coat after 1915–1916.

(A caveat: Recently, serious doubts have been raised about the authenticity of the Ottoman documents quoted in Torossian’s memoir. Given the persisting denial of access to researchers to the documentation in Turkey’s military archive there is no way to reach closure in this matter. Nevertheless, the essential point of the Torossian story remains cogent—that a large number of Christians served in the Ottoman army in World War I while the empire was busy murdering their relatives, close and distant.)

But, of course, by the start of World War I there were already many Armenians who were disaffected with the empire. After all, during 1894–1896 the Turks and their Kurdish helpers had massacred at least one hundred thousand Armenians. In 1915–1916, a very small minority in a handful of places (such as Zeitoun and Van) actually took up arms against the government, mainly to avert massacre, which almost all felt was coming.

It is unclear how many Armenians lived in the empire on the eve of World War I. Ottoman official figures spoke of some 1.2 million; Armenian sources put the number as high as 2 million. Armenians have traditionally claimed that the Turks and their Kurdish, Azeri, Chechen, Circassian and Lazi helpers murdered as many as 1.5 million Armenians during the war. The current generation of historians, including Armenian historians, believe the true figure is closer to 600,000–800,000 dead. For example, historian Raymond Kévorkian, in his book The Armenian Genocide, says that the number who “perished exceeded 600,000” by the end of 1916. But many more died—murdered, or from starvation and disease—during the following years. For example, in early 1918, between Amman and Salt in Transjordan, Turks or Circassians slaughtered “253” Armenian men women and children. They all “had their throats cut, except some babies who had been stamped on.”

ALMOST ALL are agreed that what happened was “genocide”—meaning that the Turks, who ruled the empire, intended and tried to exterminate the Armenian people who were under their control, and that this physical extermination was accompanied by cultural-religious destruction through forced conversion, mainly of women and children, to Islam; mass rape (in part designed to produce “Muslim” babies in place of Christian babies); and the destruction of the Armenian school system and intellectual and clerical elites (“cultural genocide”). Armenian clerics in each community, Gregorian, Catholic and Protestant, were usually put to death first, often after abominable torture (the plucking out of eyes, dismemberment, crucifixion, etc.).

During the past thirty years, using Western, Russian, Turkish and Armenian documentation, historians—many of them Armenian—have published a succession of studies that demonstrate beyond a shadow of doubt that the extermination of the Armenians was what the Young Turk rulers in Constantinople and the military and political authorities in the provinces intended, and what indeed transpired. The most prominent writers in the field have been Richard Hovannisian (Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918), Vahakn Dadrian (The History of the Armenian Genocide and Warrant for Genocide), Taner Akçam (A Shameful Act and The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity), Raymond Kévorkian (The Armenian Genocide) and Donald Bloxham (The Great Game of Genocide). Kévorkian’s encyclopedic, detailed description of what happened (running to more than a thousand densely packed pages), province by province, week by week, is something even a veteran SS man might find stomach-turning.

Historians around the world are still unraveling what happened in different vilayets (provinces) and sanjaks (districts)—for example the Phnom Penh–based Hilmar Kaiser’s recent The Extermination of Armenians in the Diarbekir Region. But the past and current generations of historians have not left many stones unturned when dealing with the comprehensive, national level. Nonetheless, the hundredth anniversary of the genocide has seen the publication of a spate of books on Armenian-Turkish relations. Some of them have focused on 1915–1916; a few have widened their scope to cover the evolution of those relations during the following decades; at least one has embedded the story of the genocide within the wider framework of Ottoman war-making during World War I.

RONALD GRIGOR SUNY’S “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide offers the reader a good survey of what happened, perspicacious analysis and interesting discussions about the genocide’s causal roots and the historiography of the genocide and its deniers (though the book, annoyingly, lacks a proper bibliography). Suny’s book also contains good introductory chapters on the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Armenian nationalism. But the study is a summary of the existing historiography; it offers next to nothing new in terms of research based on archival documentation. Indeed, all or almost all quotations are culled from existing works.

Thomas de Waal’s Great Catastrophe—which is how the Armenians refer to what happened to them in 1915–1916—has a different tone and a different agenda. De Waal’s book is largely journalism, not historiography. It briefly and accurately describes what happened in 1915–1916 but then goes on to survey Armenian-Turkish relations during the past hundred years and the various, and sometimes contradictory, narratives that emerged over the decades. It reviews the Palestinian-inspired terrorist campaign against Turkish targets abroad in the 1970s and 1980s by the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia. The members, who murdered a string of Turkish diplomats, including in the United States, trained in Lebanon with the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. De Waal then surveys the secret and subsequently open Turkish-Armenian diplomatic dance since then, which has failed to inaugurate full diplomatic relations between Turkey and the Republic of Armenia or to achieve a commonly agreed narrative about what had happened. Over the years, de Waal has written extensively about the politics of the Caucasus, and his expertise is brought to bear in the present volume, especially in relation to the current troubled state of play between Armenia and its Muslim neighbor, Azerbaijan.

Eugene Rogan’s The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East embeds the Armenian tragedy in World War I. The book is a general history, based mainly on published works, with a smattering of original documentation, describing refreshingly how the Ottoman Empire waged and experienced the Great War. The Ottomans unwisely chose the wrong side and ended up fighting simultaneously against Russia (in the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia) and the British (in the Dardanelles, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Palestine and Syria), while also fending off smaller challenges from Arab tribesmen in the Hijaz (from June 1916) and Greeks in the Aegean (from June 1917). The wonder is that the weak, impoverished Empire, which during the Balkan wars of 1912–1913 lost chunks of its territory to a bunch of little-league states and which had a poorly organized and poorly equipped army going into the Great War (though German officers and equipment helped out), successfully held off the Russians and British for some three years. Rogan doesn’t really explain how this happened. Of course, Allied generals blundered here and there (as, indeed, did Turkish generals). That’s war. But the Turks had a secret weapon—the physical and psychological makeup of the Turkish peasantry, who formed the backbone of the Ottoman army (the Christians, of course, ranged from untrustworthy to disloyal, while the Arabs, as the Turks saw it, had stabbed the empire in the back). Throughout the war, the Turks proved to have enormous stamina, courage and obstinacy (traits, incidentally, they again displayed in the Korean Peninsula some four decades later).

Rogan devotes a lengthy chapter, and the odd paragraph, to the Armenian massacres in the spring and summer of 1915 (he seems unaware that there was a “second stage,” in 1916, in which the Turks finished off many of the deportees who had reached the Syrian deserts). He sometimes calls what happened to the Armenians a “genocide”—but in a curious footnote explains his use of the term as follows: “The government of Turkey and the official historical establishment . . . continue to reject the use of the term ‘genocide’ . . . However, a growing number of Turkish scholars and intellectuals have struggled to open the debate on this once taboo subject . . . In support of their courageous efforts to force an honest reckoning with Turkey’s past, as well as from conviction, I refer here to the wartime annihilation of Armenians as a genocide.”

All too often, Rogan appears to portray specific deportations and mass murders as Ottoman efforts at preemption of possible local Armenian rebellion—as acts of Turkish self-defense—as when speaking of the deportations from Deurt Yol and Alexandretta, the siege and slaughter in Zeytun, or even the roundup of the Armenian elite in Constantinople on April 24. The Turks, Rogan writes, “aimed to decapitate the political and cultural leadership of the Armenian community in advance of a possible [Allied] invasion of the capital to prevent the Armenians from making common cause with the invaders.”

But in fact the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the empire’s governing party, had been planning mass deportation and massacre for months before April 24 (actually, the roundup of the leaders began on April 19), as Akçam and Kévorkian have shown. The CUP leadership for years beforehand regarded the Armenians as a general threat to the well-being and integrity of the empire and saw the genocide as an act of defensive preemption.

THE CENTRAL question that preoccupies all historians of the genocide is “why”? Why did the Turks murder these hundreds of thousands of Armenians? Contemporary historians all agree that multiple causes were at work. But each tends to lay stress on a single cause as preeminent. Suny, for example, writes: “The story . . . is that the Genocide was neither religiously motivated nor a struggle between two contending nationalisms, one of which destroyed the other [a view Suny attributes to historian Bernard Lewis], but rather the pathological response of desperate leaders who sought security against a people they had both constructed as enemies and driven into radical opposition to the regime under which they had lived for centuries.” In order to save the falling empire, Ottoman ministers Enver and Talaat sought to demographically reconfigure (or Turkify) it to render it more robust and efficient.

Other scholars have pointed to socioeconomic reasons: The CUP wanted to build a new, modern empire-state whose stability would be enhanced if commerce, industry and artisanship passed from Christian into Muslim Turkish hands; as well, the confiscated wealth of the deportees would help fund the war effort.

What to make of the welter of explanations of the genocide? A new perspective is needed. There were different levels of perpetration, with different motives at play in different segments of Turkish (and Kurdish) society. At the national level, among the CUP decision makers who launched and orchestrated the genocide of 1915–16 (primarily Talaat and Enver), there was a clear desire to fortify the empire by ridding it of its threatening internal Christian enemies, who they believed had stabbed or were stabbing the empire in the back, both through the reform process urged on the empire by the Christian powers, and in a more literal way during the war. Revenge, even on a personal level, also played a major role among the key CUP leaders who hailed from the Balkans, where Christians had driven out the Ottomans (a blow to ethnic-national pride) and dispossessed the Turkish Muslim element. And the CUP leaders also had an economic and Social Darwinian vision: to demographically reshape society so that economic power passed from the Christians to their own sort and to lay their hands on wealth that would add to their capacity to wage the world war.

On the level of the perpetrators on the ground—local officials, valis, mutasarifs, kaimakams, army and gendarmerie officers, Turkish villagers and townspeople, and Kurdish militiamen and tribesmen—Muslim/Turkish pride and vengefulness, as well as other factors, were at play. The Christian powers’ efforts, driven by Armenian complaints, to reform the empire in a way that would enhance the power of the Christians and give them “equality” were seen as a threat to the natural order—and to their own place in society, which in part was defined by having Christians under them. For Kurdish tribesmen, “reform” endangered their livelihoods, given the considerable sums they had traditionally extorted from Armenian villagers (who were also taxed, of course, by the Ottoman state). The dawn of real “equality” also meant that the provincial state officials would lose a great deal of income derived from bribery and spurious judicial processes against Armenians. On a more concrete level, the deportations and massacres brought immediate economic benefit to the victims’ Turkish and Kurdish neighbors, who laid hold of livestock, lands, houses and goods left behind by or stolen from Armenians.

Among the most important “loot” from which perpetrators benefited were Armenian women and girls. Women were forced into Muslim—Turkish, Kurdish and Arab—households as wives, concubines and servants. Armenian children, abducted or forced into Muslim homes, were economically beneficial. Armenian women also generated hard cash: their captors or officials sometimes sold them to fellow Muslims. Lastly, sexual gratification, through rape and concubinization of Armenian women, girls and boys, was also a motive among many perpetrators, who came from traditional, sexually repressed Muslim societies. And to judge from the available Western documentation, religious/Islamic/anti-infidel fervor among the perpetrators also played a major part in the massacres. Many Muslims believed they were doing Allah’s will.

A SECOND problem raised by the recent works on the Armenian genocide is the almost unwavering focus on 1915–1916. While, of course, those were the years in which the massacre of Armenians reached its zenith, the truth is that the genocidal process began in 1894–1896 and ended in 1923. A wider chronological framework is needed to make sense of 1915–1916. True, Suny, de Waal, Rogan and others mention 1894–1896. But they do not define the first round of massacre as crucial in the conditioning of Turkish hearts and minds (and, in some ways, Armenian hearts and minds) for the far larger massacres that occurred two decades later. On another level, the sultan who ordered and unleashed 1894–1896, Abdulhamid II, was also testing the bounds of Western and Russian tolerance as well as assessing both the readiness of his Muslim countrymen to butcher and the practicalities of mass murder. The massacres of 1894–1896 thus broke down psychological barriers and, at the same time, can be seen as a sort of trial run (though perhaps Abdulhamid himself thought in terms of punishment and deterrence rather than precedent). It is worth noting that from that point on, in the two-decade lead-up to 1915–1916, Turks and Armenians almost daily spoke of the grand massacre that was to come.

Similarly, these and other historians of the genocide display almost complete inattention to Turkish behavior under the nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) toward the Armenians during 1919–1923. During those years the Turks massacred many thousands of Armenians (in Marash alone, perhaps seven thousand, or even as many as twenty thousand, were massacred in February 1920), and many tens of thousands, most of them returnees from the World War I deportations, were re-deported by the Turks. This was all part of the last stage of cleansing Turkey of its Christians, of which the deportations and genocide of 1915–1916 were the undoubted centerpiece.

Armenian historians have almost uniformly zoomed in on what happened to the Armenians and ignored the Greeks—and Greek historians have often done the same in relation to the Armenians, each seeking to “singularize” their own people’s suffering (much as Jewish historians have tended to “privatize” the term “Holocaust” and criticize its use by the Armenians to define what happened to them). But whether it is good history to deal with the Armenians in isolation from what befell Ottoman Assyrians and Greeks may be questioned. What happened to the Armenians in 1894–1896, 1915–1916 and 1919–1923 formed part of a wider process of ethnic cleansing/genocide that was unleashed in stages by the Turks against all the empire’s Christians (except in Constantinople, where Christians were generally allowed to survive because the city was under intense Western scrutiny). The Armenian genocide should be viewed as part of this wider policy and process, which also saw more than half a million Assyrians and Greeks massacred and at least twice that number expelled or forced to flee their homes during the fateful years from 1914 to 1923.

Benny Morris, who has written books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Dror Ze’evi, an Ottomanist, are completing a book on the destruction of the Ottoman non-Muslim minorities, 1878–1923.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Mane Papyan