“Freedom or Death”: The Armenian
Revolutionary Federation and Justice for the
Armenian Genocide
“Freedom or Death”: The Armenian Revolutionary
Federation and Justice for the Armenian Genocide
Lilit Zeltzburg
12293717
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MA HOLOCAUST AND
GENOCIDE STUDIES
University of Amsterdam
Faculty of Humanities
2021
Supervisor: Dr. Nanci Adler
Word count: 21633 words
Contents
Abstract ……… 4
Introduction ………. 5
Theoretical framework ………. 6
Methodology ………. 12
Scope and limitations ………... 14
Chapter 1: A Century of Struggle ……… 18
Victimisation and proto-justice ……….. 18
Politics and terror, recognition and denial ……….... 23
Chapter 2: The Armenian Revolutionary Federation ……… 30
History ………... 32
Ideology ………. 39
Chapter 3: United Armenia, Nationalism, and Justice ………... 50
United Armenia ……… 50
Nationalism ………... 59
Justice ……… 63
Conclusion ………... 65
Abstract
The Armenian Genocide is a ‘non-case’ of transitional justice, and it continues to be denied by Turkey. The members of the large Armenian diaspora created by this genocide carry the legacy of their ancestors’ victimisation with them to this day. Throughout the century since the genocide, they have demanded justice for the victims of the genocide in various ways, and they hold differing views on justice. This thesis uses methods associated with oral history to
research the perspectives on justice held by the Armenian Revolutionary
Federation/Dashnaktsutyun, an international socialist and nationalist political organisation that can be seen as the main political representation of Armenians in diaspora. By outlining the history of the general Armenian struggle for justice and the historical and ideological background of the ARF, the groundwork is laid upon which, consequently, the ARF’s perspectives on justice can be analysed. This thesis finds that the ARF formulates its own central aim, namely the creation of a United Armenian nation-state, as the ultimate form of justice for the Armenian Genocide, seeing no other resolution as truly ‘just’. The thesis also concludes that existing transitional justice infrastructures are ill-equipped to offer group justice.
Introduction
During the First World War, the Ottoman Empire was falling apart. At this time, around 1915, a genocide that led to the deaths of over a million people was carried out on the empire’s Greek, Assyrian, and Armenian minorities. This was to become one of the most notorious examples of genocide before the Holocaust, with some calling it (erroneously) “the first genocide
of the twentieth century”.1 The victims of this genocide were expelled from their homes and
scattered across the globe. One of the reasons this genocide is so infamous is the fact that until this day, Turkey, the successor of the Ottoman Empire, upholds a policy of denial of the genocide. The many victims, survivors, and their descendants have not received any semblance of (official) justice for the trauma they have suffered. Throughout the century since the end of the genocide, different calls for justice have been made, in many different forms, ranging from recognition of the genocide, to the payment of reparations, to the yielding of land to the Republic of Armenia. The means through which these calls have been transmitted have also varied from building societal awareness, to lobbying through political means, to – briefly – even terrorist violence. Still, all of these calls have been unsuccessful, and the subject remains taboo within Turkey.
Since the Nuremberg Trials and the subsequent rise of transitional justice as a concept and a field of research, there appears to be a general presumption that transitional justice should follow genocide and other instances of mass categorical violence and human rights violations. The Armenian Genocide is a non-case of transitional justice, as no justice has (successfully) been offered to the survivors and their descendants. Among these people, the trauma is still very much on the surface of their experience, and they have different ideas of what justice should look like one hundred years after the genocide. However, little research has been done into what exactly those ideas of justice look like. To that end, an interesting starting point would be the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) or Dashnaktsutyun, which is considered to be the foremost political representation of the Armenian diaspora. At present, the ARF has very little formal political influence in the Republic of Armenia; however, it has profoundly shaped the lives of Armenians in diaspora. Considering that of the total eleven million Armenians living in the
1 David Olusoga, “Dear Pope Francis, Namibia was the 20th century’s first genocide,” The Guardian, April 18th,
2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/18/pope-francis-armenian-genocide-first-20th-century-namibia
world, just under three million live in the Republic of Armenia and approximately eight million live in the diaspora,2 the organisation can arguably still be seen as one of the most important groups, if not the most important group, involved in international advocacy for the survivors of the Armenian Genocide and their descendants. This makes the perspectives on justice held by the ARF and its members particularly relevant. Therefore, this thesis will focus on the question: how does the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s historical struggle for justice for the Armenian Genocide reflect the organisation and its members’ perspectives on the concept of justice?
Theoretical framework
Conceptions of transitional justice
The study of transitional justice is a burgeoning field, and there is much discussion on the history of and modern practices in the topic. One of the most renowned authorities in the field, Ruti G. Teitel, provides the following definition of transitional justice: “Transitional justice can be defined as the conception of justice associated with periods of political change, characterized
by legal responses to confront the wrongdoings of repressive predecessor regimes.”3 According
to Makau Mutua, another expert in the field, transitional justice
seeks to stabilize a postconflict (sic) society through temporary measures that signal a commitment to addressing the abuses of the past. […] The point is that in order to move forward to an inclusive and fair society, no major party can be left behind. Those who have been aggrieved must find justice in order to let go of the hatreds of the past. But equally important is the place of the perpetrators of the abusive past in the future of the society. While justice needs to be done, deep concessions must be made by each side in order to move forward to a shared and
common future.4
Although the birth of modern transitional justice can be pinned around World War I, the concept evolved into the specific, international phenomenon that we currently understand it as
2 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia, “General Information about Republic of Armenia,” MFA
of Armenia, accessed 29th September, 2019, https://www.mfa.am/en/overview; The Big School Encyclopedia [Dprotsakan metz hanragitaran], vol. 2, “Spyurk [Diaspora],” Yerevan: Armenian Encyclopedia [Haykakan Hanragitaran], 2010.
3 Ruti G. Teitel, “Transitional Justice Genealogy,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 16 (2003): 69.
4 Makau Mutua, “What is the Future of Transitional Justice?” International Journal of Transitional Justice 9, no. 1
after the end of World War II. The Nuremberg trials marked the transformation of post-war justice from a mostly national to a mostly international phenomenon, and from sanctions being
aimed at nations to a focus on individuals and their responsibility for the events.5
After the end of the Cold War, which was accompanied by an international wave of political liberalisation, multiple conceptions of justice emerged that were based not only on the rule of law, but on more pragmatic principles aimed at advancing legitimacy. This led to the
development of alternative forms of justice directed at truth-seeking and accountability.6 During
this time, the phenomenon of truth commissions, which were created for the investigation and documentation of human rights abuses, emerged. In this period in transitional justice, the focus widened from individual legal accountability to include more community-based reconciliation, turning the idea of forgiveness into a political act. The goal was not so much to establish the rule of law, as to preserve peace. Moreover, transitional justice also became viewed as a way to help victims as individuals recover from their trauma. In the words of Teitel, “[transitional] justice
became a form of dialogue between victims and their perpetrators.”7
Currently, transitional justice is in a period of expansion and normalisation. Whereas in the past it was viewed as a phenomenon associated with extraordinary conditions, transitional justice has now been institutionalised and stabilised with the creation of the permanent
International Criminal Court.8 In addition, whereas in the past there appeared to be a tension
between the search for truth and the struggle for justice, in this millennium that tension has been replaced by the view that the two are actually complementary. It is now argued that pursuing
only one pathway of transitional justice is insufficient for any kind of “larger justice” to emerge.9
More specifically, it is argued that a strictly legalistic approach to transitional justice does not do justice to the survivors, whose experiences are often more complex than can be processed through a legal paradigm. Selma Leydesdorff explains as follows:
By narrowing the survivors’ desires down to material compensation and juridical procedures, the survivors’ life stories are also reduced to the demands, format, and language of the law. In preparation for the proceedings and in court, exact
5 Teitel, “Genealogy,” 73. 6 Ibid., 77.
7 Ibid., 78-84. 8 Ibid., 89-91.
9 Naomi Roht-Arriaza, “The New Landscape of Transitional Justice,” in Transitional Justice in the Twenty-first
Century: Beyond Truth versus Justice, eds. Naomi Roht-Arriaza and Javier Mariezcurrena (Cambridge: Cambridge
information is required, yet the victim struggles with something
incomprehensible, something beyond any traditional concept of history.10
In other words, the legal path to justice, which takes a strict approach to ‘historical facts’, can only address a small part of the victims’ suffering. Moreover, we must be wary of the presumption that the ‘truths’ created by the legal process are somehow separate from, and therefore not influenced by, the social context of the legal process itself. ‘Justice’ can mean different things to different peoples, and since the legal path does not automatically and inescapably lead to cultural change or reconciliation, it cannot unequivocally guarantee justice in
all cases.11 Therefore, a broader approach to transitional justice is needed.
The concept of transitional justice is thus based on the idea that perpetrators of mass violence can be held to account. The ways that this has been done in the past can be divided between three “models of accountability”, according to human rights academic Kathryn Sikkink. The first, the “sovereign immunity” model, holds that state officials cannot and should not be held accountable for human rights violations at all. In the second, the “state accountability” model, states as a political entity could be held accountable for human rights violations; however, this also means that if a state chooses not to cooperate with the demands of international law, international organisations are essentially powerless, as they cannot enforce the law. This model is used by many international courts, such as the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. On the other hand, the third, “individual criminal accountability” model demands accountability of individuals. Unlike the second model, according to which a state could be required to provide remedies and pay restitutions, those convicted under this model end up in prison. This model is prominent in our contemporary understanding of transitional justice and is followed by courts such as the International Criminal Court, as well as tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia.12
10 Selma Leydesdorff, “Why Compensation is a Mixed Blessing,” in The Genocide Convention: The Legacy of 60
Years, eds. Harmen van der Wilt, Jeroen Vervliet, Goran Sluiter, Johannes Houwink ten Cate (Leiden: Brill Nijhoff,
2012), 110.
11 Nanci Adler, “Introduction: On History, Historians, and Transitional Justice,” in Understanding the Age of
Transitional Justice: Crimes, Courts, Commissions, and Chronicling, ed. Nanci Adler (New Brunswick, New
Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2018): 2-7.
12 Kathryn Sikkink, “Models of Accountability and the Effectiveness of Transitional Justice,” in After Oppression:
Transitional Justice in Latin America and Eastern Europe, eds. Vesselin Popovski and Monica Serrano (Tokyo,
Transitional justice as a concept is intrinsically linked to the idea of human rights. This means that what we view as fair and just is related to the universal rights that all humans inherently have. However, it has been argued that this carries with it certain limitations. First of all, as Makau Mutua argues, the ideas about human rights that we hold are shaped and defined by Western liberalism. The foundational texts of human rights as we know them were written with hardly any participation from people outside of the West. Second, much of the human rights movement is strongly focused on political and civil rights, meaning that discussions of economic, social, and cultural rights are largely sidelined. Finally, the human rights corpus places the individual at the centre of the moral universe, meaning that the role of the community
is diminished and events are viewed as resulting from the actions of individuals.13 On the other
hand, this carries implications for victims too. According to Ana Filipa Vrdoljak, although new instruments intended specifically for the protection of minority groups have been developed in the past decades, on its own, the universalised application of human rights to individuals is insufficient to protect those targeted for their (perceived) membership of a particular (imagined)
community.14 As a result, the status quo within the infrastructure of transitional justice is centred
around individuals, and the discussion on how to address group perpetration and group victimhood is ongoing.
There is some tension between the different conceptions of transitional justice. Although the concept originated as a highly legalised one, some authors expand the definition to include
grassroots approaches to justice and reconciliation after a period of violence.15 Thus, although
ideas about what “transitional justice” really means vary, drawing on the literature discussed above, for the purposes of this thesis the concept will be defined as formalised processes of confronting violent events, aimed at offering justice to those affected by violence. These processes can, but do not need to, result in legal prosecution of individuals, material reparations for victims, the altering of national law, the education curriculum, and the public space to accommodate the new historical narrative and/or political situation, and other developments.
13 Mutua, “Future of Transitional Justice,” 3-4.
14 Ana Filipa Vrdoljak, “Genocide and Restitution: Ensuring Each Group’s Contribution to Humanity,” The
European Journal of International Law 22, no. 1 (2011): 39.
Why is transitional justice important?
The effectiveness of transitional justice is not at all self-explanatory or undisputed. After all, past experiences have demonstrated that transitional justice can be complicated and fragile. In some societies, attempts to implement transitional justice have backfired, leading to regression and sometimes even resumption of conflict. In other places, transitional justice mechanisms were
unsuccessful in distancing the perpetrators from their positions of power.16 However, these
historical failures do not diminish from the importance of transitional justice as a concept. In essence, transitional justice institutions try to spread the idea that individuals can and should be tried for systematic political violence; in other words, that justice for victims is possible and
necessary.17 The stated goal of transitional justice is to “end impunity” by demonstrating that
nobody, no matter how powerful, is above the law.18 This is affirmed by Michael Ignatieff, who
states that “[…] leaving war crimes unpunished is worse: it leaves the cycle of impunity
unbroken and permits societies to indulge their fantasies of denial.”19
Thus, institutions of transitional justice create a historical record of political violence, which serves to counter denial both about the scope of systematic violence and about a particular
society’s responsibility for past violence.20 Countering denial is crucial because, in the
Habermasian view, actively confronting and commemorating past abuses contributes to a
society’s commitment to democratic values and reforms.21 In addition, according to Theodor
Adorno, the desire to forget, that is, the “destruction of memory”, is tantamount to the loss of history; therefore, confronting the past on both an individual and a societal level is necessary to
prevent violent tendencies from resurfacing.22 For societies that have experienced such extreme
violence, an important benefit of pursuing transitional justice is the fact that “public rituals of atonement”, such as public apologies and commemorations, can symbolically release these
societies from present association with historical crimes.23
16 Mutua, “Future of Transitional Justice,” 2.
17 Bronwyn Anne Leebaw, “The Irreconcilable Goals of Transitional Justice,” Human Rights Quarterly 30, no. 1
(2008): 109.
18 Ibid., 110.
19 Michael Ignatieff, “Articles of faith,” Index on Censorship 25, no. 5 (1996): 118. 20 Leebaw, “Irreconcilable Goals,” 107.
21 Ibid., 107; M. Cherif Bassiouni, “Searching for Peace and Achieving Justice: The Need for Accountability,” Law
and Contemporary Problems 59, no. 4 (1996): 26.
22 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of ‘Working Through the Past’” (1959) in Adorno, Critical Models,
Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 89-103;
Bassiouni, “Need for Accountability,” 26.
Transitional justice is important for victims of violence and their descendants, too. Recognition of their experiences can help restore victims’ sense of agency, following an event that violently rid them of that agency and turned them into objects. Some victims are helped by the short-term catharsis of testifying about their experiences in public, although some others are
re-traumatised.24 It has also been argued that in the absence of formal justice, victims could be
tempted to take justice into their own hands, leading to expressions of vengefulness.25
Conversely, trying individual perpetrators for their role in systematic political violence is
believed to diminish potential feelings of vengefulness among victims.26 Trials, as well as the
previously mentioned “public rituals of atonement”, can also help individuals to heal from a
traumatic past.27 In acknowledging and atoning for past crimes, perpetrators demonstrate respect
to the humanity of the victims, whereas denying them is “a continuing affront to [their] dignity
and humanity”.28
Finally, some have claimed that formal processes of transitional justice bolster respect for (international) law and legal institutions. However, this argumentation must be problematised, as it assumes that the law and our legal institutions are, and should be seen as, unproblematic and infallible. Considering the fact that almost all forms of transitional justice that are known to us rest on the idea of individual accountability, tribunals most of all, they reinforce the idea that systematic violence is inherently a result of the decisions of an elite. By placing full responsibility for violence on the shoulders of a relatively small group of people, this assumption bypasses the question of why in reality, large groups of people get involved in systematic violence. In addition, it carries the implication that large groups of people cannot and should not
be held legally accountable for their participation in mass violence at all.29 In other words, the
transitional justice processes and institutions that we currently have are not and should not be above criticism. Although transitional justice institutions may contribute to the documentation of past injustice, the assimilation of democratic values in societies, and the healing of the trauma of
24 Roht-Arriaza, “New Landscape,” 4-5.
25 Gary John Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2002), ch. 8.
26 Leebaw, “Irreconcilable Goals,” 110. 27 Ignatieff, “Articles,” 121-122.
28 Haig Khatchadourian, “Compensation and Reparation as Forms of Compensatory Justice,” Metaphilosophy 37,
no. 3-4 (2006): 431.
victims of violence, it is vital that the discussion on how to best respond to genocides and other instances of mass violence remain ongoing.
Methodology
This thesis will make use of methods associated with oral history, which involves the use of recorded oral testimony as a source for research. This method is not entirely uncontroversial, as oral history is challenged by questions such as the accuracy of witness accounts, the ethics of interviews, and the place of the interviewer in their own research. By definition, oral history is subjective, as it relies not only on the interviewees’ recollections of the (sometimes distant) past,
but also on the interpersonal skills and interpretation of the interviewer.30 However, oral history
also offers certain avenues that are inaccessible through other forms of research. It is important to examine who is given a voice in ‘traditional’, written history, and who is excluded; historically, those excluded have been members of societally disadvantaged groups, including
members of groups that have been victims of mass violence.31 Thus, oral history can give a voice
to those whose experiences were previously considered unworthy of being voiced.
Thanks to the popularisation of social history after the 1960s, oral history as a method has greatly evolved. For example, when Holocaust victims’ testimonies began to be engaged with on a qualitative level, it was found that this met a certain strong, emotional need to be heard that was shared by many survivors. Still, these testimonies were not allowed to stand on their own, but were rather used to support the researcher’s general narrative. In other words, testimony was used to illustrate the researcher’s narrative, but it was not permitted to disrupt it or stand at its centre. This was perceived as problematic, because a great deal of the complexity of the victims’
experiences was lost in this process.32 One of the reasons why this problem could develop was
because of a strict separation between different disciplines. Some have found that their research potential was limited because of their lack of training in methods outside of their formal
30 Ellen L. Fleischmann, “Crossing the Boundaries of History: Exploring Oral History in Researching Palestinian
Women in the Mandate Period,” Women’s History Review 5, no. 3 (1996): 365; Paul Thompson, The Voice of the
Past: Oral History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 222.
31 Fleischmann, “Boundaries of History,” 352.
32 Tony Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony, Ethics, and the Problem of Representation,” Poetics Today 27, no. 2
academic discipline.33 Thus, for the practice of oral history, one must be prepared to look beyond the boundaries of traditional history and adopt practices from fields such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology. In this vein, since the 1990s, a certain shift has occurred, and thanks to insights gained from a more interdisciplinary approach, the value of the individual life story has slowly become more widely appreciated. Presently, oral history as a whole is more widely viewed as a valuable method that can provide us with perspectives that other methods
simply could not.34
Whereas in the past, information gathering through oral history was done in a highly guided, impersonal, and quantitative way, nowadays researchers tend to prefer a more hands-off approach. The researcher is advised to remember that they intend to learn something from the interviewee. One of the suggested methods of interviewing involves simply letting the interviewee speak freely, only asking for elaboration after they have said their piece, reserving specific questions for later in the conversation. This method has proved highly effective in both
learning new information and filling in the gaps in existing knowledge.35 It is also argued that by
allowing the testifier to give information that they want to remember, rather than only information that the interviewer wants to know, the interviewer can actually glean certain details
that fill the gaps of what is already known, thereby revealing alternative historical narratives.36 In
addition, some assert that even testimonies that include inaccurate information or even have been (partially) fictionalised are valuable, because they still tell us something about the testifier’s
personal experience and identity.37 In this sense, an exaggerated focus on empiricism can
actually limit the production of history and the evolution of historical narratives.38
Oral histories can help create a record of the experiences of victims of mass violence. The implications of this practice reach far beyond the world of academia. Considering the fact that perpetrators of genocide have the intent to destroy their victim group, both physically and metaphysically, through the destruction of memory, the practice of oral history in itself effectively counteracts one aspect of this destruction. Thus, collecting and recording the testimonies of survivors of systematic mass violence such as the Armenian Genocide contributes
33 Fleischmann, “Boundaries of History,” 352. 34 Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony,” 279-282. 35 Thompson, “Voice of the Past,” 284-286. 36 Fleischmann, “Boundaries of History,” 364. 37 Kushner, “Holocaust Testimony,” 284-289. 38 Fleischmann, “Boundaries of History,” 367.
to keeping alive that memory which the perpetrators have tried to erase. After all, per Donald Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller: “The oral historian has a unique role to play in the Armenian community in attempting to mirror and clarify the complex experience of those who survived
one of the greatest atrocities of this century.”39
Scope and limitations
The lasting effects of the Armenian Genocide continue to impact the lives of the descendants of the genocide’s victims over a century later, both in the Republic of Armenia and in the diaspora. In Turkey, too, these effects are still visible. Assuming that the party from whom justice is demanded would be the legal descendant of the Ottoman Empire, i.e. the modern
Republic of Turkey,40 we must take into account that the political situation in that country has a
concrete effect on the struggle for justice for the Armenian Genocide. This discussion would be incomplete if we do not note the connection between Turkish nation-building and the ideological violence against its minorities, both historically and contemporarily. The construction of the modern Turkish state and its identity was accompanied by campaigns of ethnic homogenisation that victimised the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, but also the Kurds, among other
minorities.41 The Turkish state’s more recent history of violence and discrimination against its
Kurdish minority in particular stands out as what could be seen as continuity in the creation and enforcement of exclusionary Turkish national identity over the past century or so. Furthermore, it has been argued that the separation of these issues is part of an attempt to present Turkish nationalism as a response to, rather than a cause of, the oppression of the Armenians and the
Kurds.42
39 Donald E. Miller and Lorna Tourian Miller, “Armenian Survivors: A Typological Analysis of Victim Response,”
The Oral History Review 10 (1982): 72. Donald Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller’s analysis of their interviews with
Armenian Genocide survivors in the early 1980s is one of the leading works in Armenian oral history, both from a theoretical and a methodological perspective. This report remains a reference point even for more recent oral history works.
40 Vahagn Avedian, “State Identity, Continuity, and Responsibility: The Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey
and the Armenian Genocide,” The European Journal of International Law 23, no. 3 (2012): 819-820.
41 Uğur Ümit Üngör, “‘Turkey for the Turks’: Demographic Engineering in Eastern Anatolia, 1914-1945,” in A
Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, eds. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma
Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 290.
42 Bilgin Ayata, “The Kurds in the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Process: Double-Bind or Double-Blind?”
The state ideology and national identity that this demographic engineering aimed to entrench have also been ingrained in Turkey’s conception of its own history. The campaigns of homogenisation of the Republic’s identity were accompanied by the deliberate erasure of the memory of an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous Turkey, and the rewriting of ethnic
minorities as Turks.43 This proceeded to the point where even internationally, the language used
to discuss the geographical region is coloured. In common parlance, as well as in scholarly work, the region more or less encompassing the Ottoman provinces that had large Armenian populations is generally referred to as ‘Eastern Anatolia’. For all its aura of neutrality, this term is problematic, as it was deliberately introduced in order to replace the previous common
designation of the region: the Armenian Highlands, or Armenian Plateau.44 Although this name
for the province of modern Turkey was institutionalised at the First Geography Congress in 1941, official attempts to dissociate the region from the Armenians started as early as 1880, with
Sultan Abdulhamid II’s prohibition of the use of the name ‘Armenia’ in official documents.45
The regions historically called respectively Anatolia and the Armenian Highlands do not overlap; therefore, the decision to rename the latter ‘Eastern Anatolia’ was deliberate and not based on historical or geographical precedent. It follows that the continued use of the term contributes to the erasure of Armenian history in modern-day Turkey and the normalisation of the repression of memory of the genocide.
43 Üngör, “Demographic Engineering,” 304.
44 Richard G. Hovannisian, “The Armenian Genocide: Wartime Radicalization or Premeditated Continuum?” in: The
Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Transaction Publishers, 2007), 3.
45 Lusine Sahakyan, Turkification of the Toponyms in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey (Montreal:
Arod Books, 2010), 12. In her research on the “Turkification” of toponyms, Sahakian makes excellent use of primary sources, which makes her work invaluable to the present discussion. However, her writing also shows a clear political bias, which is important to keep in mind.
Fig. 1. The natural borders of the Armenian Plateau according to H.F.B. Lynch (1901)46
Conversely, where Turkey has attempted to suppress or co-opt the memory of the violence against its minorities, it is important to note that Kurds have called for official recognition and justice for the Armenian Genocide and have been heavily involved in grassroots-level reconciliation with Armenians, thereby offering an alternative to state-led reconciliation attempts, which have been perceived as disingenuous in the past. An example of this is the restoration of Sourp Khach church on Lake Van by the Turkish government versus the restoration of Sourp Giragos church in Diyarbakir by the Kurdish municipality and Armenian patriarchate. The restoration of Sourp Khach was announced as an effort to counter “genocide claims”, and entailed the changing of its Armenian name to the more Turkish-sounding ‘Akdamar’ and conversion of the church to a museum, in which mass can only be held once yearly. On the other hand, the restoration of Sourp Giragos was accompanied by active attempts
to revive Armenian history and culture in Diyarbakir.47 From this, we can see that the Turkish
state is trying to appropriate and sanitise the remembrance of Armenian history and the Armenian Genocide by incorporating it into a narrative that complements and legitimises its own state nationalism.
46 H. F. B. Lynch, The Natural Borders of the Armenian Plateau, 1901, in Armenia, Travels and Studies, vol. 1,
Wikimedia Commons accessed February 5, 2021, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27028489
This narrative of denial does not exist in a vacuum; it has an effect on the people whose history is being denied. Research exists on the impact of trauma on the generations following a
traumatic event.48 Research also exists on the trauma experienced by the (descendants of)
survivors of the Armenian Genocide due to the re-traumatisation as a consequence of Turkey’s
policy of genocide denial.49 Leydesdorff explains that “[to] be denied recognition - or to be
‘misrecognized’ - is to suffer both a distortion of one’s relation to one’s self and an injury to one’s identity, because it involves reconnection to a society and a world that seem to have been
lost.”50 The world that the survivors of the Armenian Genocide knew was lost to them forever,
and the world that replaced it left no space for them or their descendants, having been built on the denial that a different world had ever existed at all. Therefore, for any semblance of justice for the Armenian Genocide to be perceived, this denial must be confronted, and the experiences of the victims of Turkey’s nation-building must be recognised.
Further exploration of (intergenerational) trauma, genocide denial, Turkish national identity, and the Kurdish question is necessary, but falls outside of the scope of this thesis. In the chapters that follow, I will focus on the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s struggle for justice. I attempt to place the organisation’s goals within the framework of transitional justice. I also use the methods of oral history to conduct interviews with young ARF members in the diaspora, in order to discern their personal experiences of the organisation’s ideology. The first chapter will provide a brief background of the many different ways in which Armenians around the world have pursued justice for the genocide. The second chapter will discuss the ARF’s history and ideology, including the insights gleaned from the interviews conducted with Dutch ARF members. In the third chapter, I will delve deeper into the organisation’s understanding of and ideas about justice, and analyse these ideas’ roots, implications, strengths, and shortcomings. Ultimately, through this discussion, I hope to contribute to the ongoing academic debate on how best to offer justice and recognition to survivors of systematic violence.
48 See for example Liat Ayalon, “Challenges Associated with the Study of Resilience to Trauma in Holocaust
Survivors,” Journal of Loss and Trauma 10, no. 4 (2005), John Saroyan, “Suppressed and Repressed Memories among Armenian Genocide Survivors,” Peace Review 27, no. 2 (2015), Anie S. Kalayjian et. al., “Coping with Ottoman Turkish Genocide: An Exploration of the Experience of Armenian Survivors,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 9, no. 1 (1996).
49 See for example Roger W. Smith, Eric Markusen, Robert Jay Lifton, “Professional Ethics and the Denial of the
Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9, no. 1 (1995), Selina L. Mangassarian, “100 Years of Trauma: the Armenian Genocide and Intergenerational Cultural Trauma,” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment &
Trauma 25, no. 4 (2016).
Chapter 1: A century of struggle
The pursuit of justice for the victims of the Armenian Genocide began while atrocities were still ongoing during the First World War and continues until this day. This amounts to over a century of struggle, throughout which much has changed not just for the Armenians and their understanding of their trauma, but also for the world’s perception of mass violence and minority rights. During this time, this pursuit of justice has taken a number of different forms, born out of the needs of and means available to the Armenians, wherever they were, and whenever. Some of these forms were specific to the time and context they were borne of, whereas others echo through to our times, having perhaps modernised somewhat, but retaining their essence. In order to understand the contemporary ARF’s perspectives on justice, it is necessary to provide a background on what the broader struggle for justice looked like and to situate the ARF within that context. Therefore, the varying ways in which Armenians have struggled for justice for the genocide will be discussed in this chapter.
Victimisation and proto-justice
The world was different from ours at the time of the Armenian Genocide. The word ‘genocide’ itself had not even been invented yet, and within the dominant conception of state sovereignty, violence against a state’s own minorities was considered an internal affair, and not the responsibility of an international community. International justice as a notion was not, itself, unheard of, but the idea that the perpetrators of wartime civilian massacres could be legally
prosecuted was unprecedented.51 Nevertheless, the fate of the Armenians did not go unnoticed by
foreign dignitaries at the time. Disturbed by reports of violence on Armenian intellectuals in April 1915, Viscount James Bryce launched an investigation into the events, the results of which he published as a Parliamentary Blue Book in late 1916 under the title The Treatment of
Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.52 Regarding the contents of this report, he stated that: “All civilized nations able to assist the Armenians today should know that the need is still extremely
51 Michelle Tusan, “"Crimes against Humanity": Human Rights, the British Empire, and the Origin of the Response
to the Armenian Genocide,” American Historical Review (2014): 47.
52 James Bryce and Arnold J. Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916: Documents
urgent . . . this requires worldwide assistance for feeding, clothing, housing and repatriation.”53 American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time, Henry Morgenthau also wrote in detail in his 1919 memoir about the violence against Armenians and particularly his discussions on the
topic with Enver and Talaat Pasha.54 These and other observers in various degrees called to help
the Armenians and the other persecuted Christian minorities during the war, making it so that people in the West were aware of the plight of the Armenians, and the topic was discussed on a political level as well.
This affected the way the Ottoman Empire was treated after the war. The Entente powers were generally sympathetic to the Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire, and this was quite clear from the Treaty of Sèvres, in which the terms of the Ottoman defeat were established. Among other provisions, the Treaty included obligations with regards to the groups that had been subjected to violence by the Ottoman government. Article 142, for example, required the government to facilitate the work of commissions established by the League of Nations to receive complaints from victims of violence, while Article 144 required the government to assist
victims in returning to their homes and livelihoods.55 In addition, importantly, the Treaty
obligated Turkey to recognise an independent Armenian state, within the boundaries of the Van, Bitlis, Erzurum, and Trabzon vilayets. These provisions were included specifically with the aim of providing some measure of justice to the victims of what was, at the time, referred to as massacres and deportations. However, although the representative of the sultan signed the Treaty, the nationalists that would soon assume power in the country had secretly come to a separate agreement with the Soviet Union, which would free Turkey from the obligations laid upon it by the Treaty of Sèvres. After their victory in the ensuing civil war as well as a war against the young Armenian republic, the nationalists, led by Mustafa Kemal, succeeded in renegotiating new terms for Turkey under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1922-1923. This Treaty,
53 Tusan, ““Crimes against Humanity”,” 57.
54 Ronald Grigor Suny, “Writing Genocide: The Fate of the Ottoman Armenians,” in A Question of Genocide:
Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, eds. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman
M. Naimark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15-21.
55 “The Treaty of Peace Between the Allied and Associated Powers and Turkey Signed at Sèvres,” signed 10th of
August 1920, The Treaties of Peace 1919-1923, Vol. II (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1924), https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Section_I,_Articles_1_-_260.
which thoroughly avoided any mention of Armenians or the crimes committed by the Ottoman
government, allowed Turkey to consider the Armenian problem resolved.56
Before Lausanne, however, the Ottoman government was still bound to the terms being negotiated in Sèvres. Simultaneously, in part hoping for more goodwill from the Western powers, the Ottoman government instituted a series of courts-martial to try the perpetrators of the crimes committed during the war. Although many top functionaries of the wartime Ottoman government, including the Three Pashas, had fled the country in 1918, the general sentiment in the Ottoman administration and the general population was that the remaining perpetrators needed to be prosecuted; the first post-war Ottoman Prime Minister even proclaimed that the crimes against the Armenians were sufficient “to make the conscience of mankind shudder with
horror for ever (sic).”57 The trials were carried out over two years, between 1918 and 1920, in
series clustered around principle sites of mass murder (Yozgat, Trabzon, Harput, Bayburt, Erzincan, Mosul), as well as a series dealing mostly with charges of pillage and plunder, and a series that specifically tried the responsible officials, including the ministers of the two wartime cabinets. They involved dozens of suspects, ranging from minor functionaries to the Three Pashas themselves. The trials were procedurally sound, despite periodic obstruction in the form
of the obfuscation or destruction of evidence.58 Crucially, the courts-martial judged that the
deportations and massacres of Armenians had been premeditated, intended, and centrally planned. In addition, they judged that the violence was not a result of mutual slaughter of any kind: in other words, the victims were not casualties of a civil war, and had not provoked the violence on themselves. This was a conclusion that was not reached based on Armenian testimony: on the contrary, Armenian testimonies were ultimately excluded from the judgment, in order to erase any doubt on the impartiality of the court. These considerations led the court to find many of the defendants, including high-level officials, guilty of premeditated murder. However, many of the suspects managed to escape prison before this verdict had been pronounced. As a result, only three defendants were convicted and hanged following the
56 Richard G. Hovannisian, “The Republic of Armenia,” in The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times,
Vol II: Foreign Dominion to Statehood: The Fifteenth Century to the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard G.
Hovannisian (London: Macmillan, 1997), 332-346.
57 Richard G. Hovannisian, “Genocide and Independence,” in The Armenians: Past and Present in the Making of
National Identity, eds. Edmund Herzig and Marina Kurkchiyan (Oxon: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 93.
58 Vahakn N. Dadrian, “The Documentation of the World War I Armenian Massacres in the Proceedings of the
judgment; others were sentenced to death in absentia.59 Due to the absence of the international legal infrastructure necessary to prosecute the fugitive officials outside of Turkey, they were able to travel through Europe with minimal impediments. In this sense, the courts-martial did not bring justice to Armenian victims; however, they did generate a body of archival material that
would later prove invaluable to our understanding of the genocide.60
The justice not delivered by the Ottoman military courts continued to be actively sought afterwards, as many in the Armenian communities, now expelled from their homes, pondered how to claim redress, retribution, and, perhaps, revenge on behalf of their murdered brethren. Although they had previously been split along the lines of political affiliation, geography, and class, following the genocide it felt as though all Armenians were fighting on the same side. Therefore, what was set into motion by the ARF in 1919 was received with sympathy by Armenians not affiliated with the organisation as well. The ARF’s General Congress in the autumn of 1919 approved a top-secret resolution titled ‘Hadug Kordz’ (Special Work or Mission). For this special work, a list of names of former Ottoman officials responsible for the deportations and massacres was compiled, at the top of which were the Three Pashas, as well as
dr. Shakir and dr. Nazim.61 To finance the operation, a ‘Hadug Kumar’ (Special Fund) was
opened, which was subsequently fed by donations from wealthy Armenians, primarily in the American diaspora. By the summer of 1920, the logistics of this work had been thought out, and it was named Operation Nemesis, after the Greek goddess of retribution. Its goal would be to track down and assassinate those deemed most responsible for the genocide, most of whom had
been sentenced to death in absentia by the Ottoman courts-martial.62 This operation spanned
across continents, lasted three years, and was kept completely secret for decades. The most famous among these assassinations was Soghomon Tehlirian’s attack on Talaat Pasha in Berlin in March of 1921. At the ensuing trial Tehlirian claimed that he had been ordered to kill Talaat
59 The court did not only hand out death sentences: some of the defendants were sentenced to light prison terms,
although they rarely served them out. Dadrian, “Documentation,” 566; Annette Höss, “The Trial of Perpetrators by the Turkish Military Tribunals: The Case of Yozgat,” in The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (London: Macmillan, 1992), 219-221.
60 Ibid., 564-566.
61 It is unknown how many names were actually on these lists, as they are kept in the carefully guarded archives of
the ARF. Some of these lists are said to contain two hundred names. The names we know for certain are (at least) as follows: Enver Pasha, Mustafa Kemal Pasha, Jemal Pasha, Cevdet Bey, Muamar Bey, Jemal Azmi Bey, Bedri Bey, Azmi Bey, Topal Atif, Kara Kemal, dr. Behaeddin Shakir, dr. Mehmet Nazim, Talaat Pasha. Eric Bogosian,
Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide (New York: Little, Brown and
Company, 2015), 206-207.
by his dead mother, whom he saw in recurring dreams, and that his conscience was clear. The trial garnered both national and international attention, and crucially, the presiding judge insisted on hearing the circumstances that led Tehlirian to seek revenge against Talaat - in other words, the trial transformed from one on the premeditated murder of a former Ottoman official, to one on the Armenian Genocide. When Tehlirian was pronounced not guilty of murder, the verdict
was met with cheers and flowers - and with approval from Armenians worldwide.63 What was
unknown at the time was that Talaat was on the top of the list compiled by the instigators of Operation Nemesis, and Tehlirian had been recruited by the ARF specifically for this task based in part on his sympathetic, melancholy impression, with the intention of using the trial to bring
widespread attention to the genocide.64 What was likewise unknown was that Talaat’s murder
was part of a larger plan. In three years, ARF operatives systematically tracked down and assassinated seven former high-level Ottoman officials across Europe, the Caucasus, and the
Soviet Union.65 Armenian communities around the world welcomed news of these
assassinations, but by 1922, the ARF voted to shut down the operation on the grounds that it had become too expensive. They decided that the primary challenge for Armenian communities, both in the Caucasus and in the diaspora, was to feed and clothe the survivors of the genocide; the money from the Special Fund would be of far more use to that end than any satisfaction that may
have been derived from revenge assassinations.66
The survivors of the genocide had been scattered across the world and were confronted with the ordeal of processing their trauma and building up their lives again. Many of them, unable to face what they had gone through, chose not to discuss their experiences and focused instead on their new lives and homes. This time, spanning roughly from the 1920s to 1965, is sometimes referred to as the ‘silent period’. That name is somewhat misleading. Granted, there were little to no public discussions of the genocide, particularly in Armenia, where the Soviet government censored the topic in line with its ideology of turning its constituent nations from nationalism to proletarian internationalism, shaping their historical identity into a new, socialist
63 Sévane Garibian, “"Commanded by my Mother's Corpse": Talaat Pasha, or the Revenge Assassination of a
Condemned Man,” Journal of Genocide Research 20, no. 2 (2018): 223-232.
64 Bogosian, Operation Nemesis, 285-326.
65 In 1926, the Turkish national assembly voted to grant pensions to the widows and orphans of those killed during
Operation Nemesis and those hanged by the military tribunal after the war. Erik Jan Zürcher, “Renewal and Silence: Postwar Unionist and Kemalist Rhetoric on the Armenian Genocide,” in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and
Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, eds. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimark
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 314.
one.67 Nevertheless, the genocide was not completely absent from the public sphere. Armenian political parties worked to remind the West of the plight of the Armenians, to the point where the American and European public was well acquainted with the image of the ‘starving
Armenians’.68 In addition, within Armenian communities, the genocide was still discussed in art
and literature. Literary representation of the genocide allowed the memory to live on even as survivors passed. Survivors often wrote not directly about the events of the genocide, but about their experiences of them, and about the fate of the Armenian people as a group now living in dispersion. Notably, this literature rarely discussed the perpetrators. According to Rubina Peroomian, one of the leading experts on Armenian literature, this was out of an unwillingness to believe what had happened, and what the perpetrators, many of whom had previously been compatriots, neighbours, even friends, had done. What is also reflected in literature of the time is an intense anxiety over the loss of Armenian identity, as young Armenians, having experienced such immense trauma, turned away from their communities and their identity and chose to
comfort themselves through relationships with non-Armenians.69 Altogether, in the half-century
following the genocide, survivors struggled to understand and convey the burden that weighed on them, that affected them and their children even when they tried their hardest to ignore it. In
the words of Rubina Peroomian: “Genocide is not comprehended yet. Its impact persists.”70
Politics and terror, recognition and denial
The fiftieth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in 1965 brought an end to this period of silence. The first ever commemoration of the genocide in Soviet Armenia, held that year, escalated into a rally, with people demanding justice for their suffering and the ‘return’ of historically Armenian lands. At the same time, in the diaspora, there was growing impatience with community leadership, particularly the ARF, on account of their failure to advance the Armenian cause towards any kind of recognition or justice for the aging group of first generation survivors. This all happened against the background of a decade when widespread student
67 Rubina Peroomian, “The Memory of Genocide in Soviet Armenian Literature,” Banber Matenadaran 21 (2014):
233-235.
68 Suny, “Writing Genocide,” 21.
69 Rubina Peroomian, “Armenian Literary Responses to Genocide: The Artistic Struggle to Comprehend and
Survive,” in The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (London: Macmillan, 1992), 227-244.
protests and movements for national liberation created tolerance for (potentially violent) political struggle. It was at the crossroads of these circumstances that the phenomenon of Armenian terrorism arose. The early 1970s saw the appearance of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), a group that had friendly ties with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and that directly challenged the position of the ARF as the face of the diaspora’s political demands for recognition and justice. With their leftist radicalism and willingness to use violence to achieve their goals, they mirrored the ARF’s own history with Operation Nemesis, signifying themselves as successors to both that legacy and to the ARF’s leadership position. Their stated goals were the recognition of the genocide, payment of reparations to victims, and restoration of historical Armenia. To these ends, the group attacked Turkish officials and diplomats, most famously seizing the Turkish Consulate in Paris and holding 56 people hostage for 16 hours in 1981. Such attacks garnered the group and the causes it pursued international attention and support, from Armenians and
non-Armenians alike.71 Shortly after ASALA’s debut, another Armenian terrorist organisation
emerged: the Justice Commandos for the Armenian Genocide (JCAG), reported (though not definitively confirmed) to have been created by the ARF in response to the challenge issued by ASALA. Where ASALA used explosives in its attacks, the JCAG favoured firearms, and its attacks were frighteningly precise and deadly. Despite the fact that it killed significantly more people than ASALA, it received less publicity than its competitor, because it was far less keen on
focusing attention on itself and its ideology than the more overtly leftist, socialist ASALA.72
Much of ASALA’s popularity waned, however, following its botched attack on Orly Airport in 1983, when an explosive device detonated prematurely and killed eight people, none of whom the group intended to target. By the mid-1980s, most Armenians and non-Armenians were no longer comfortable expressing sympathy for ASALA, and the organisation waned away into infighting and oblivion. JCAG halted its activities around the same time, seemingly feeling it had
nothing more to accomplish, having accomplished all it could.73
Even though most people no longer valorised these terrorist groups and disapproved of their increasingly indiscriminate and bloody violence, what ASALA and JCAG had
71 Laura Dugan, Julie Y. Huang, Gary LaFree, Clark McCauley, “Sudden Desistance from Terrorism: The Armenian
Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia and the Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide,” Dynamics of
Asymmetric Conflict 1, no. 3 (2008): 233-235.
72 Francis P. Hyland, Armenian Terrorism: The Past, The Present, The Prospects (Boulder: Westview, 1991), ch. 7. 73 Dugan, Huang, LaFree, McCauley, “Sudden Desistance from Terrorism,” 243-246.
accomplished was inspiring a renewed interest in and awareness of the Armenian Genocide and the Armenian cause. In a 1983 article, Paul Wilkinson wrote that
it must be admitted that until the current Asala (sic) terrorist campaign, very few people knew anything about the grievances of the Armenians against the Turks. The young fanatical idealists who now declare themselves ready to go on ‘suicide missions’ […] believe that terrorism is the only weapon left to them, and that it is only the propaganda of atrocity that can bring them the international publicity and pressure to further their cause.74
This “propaganda of atrocity” was indeed successful in materialising international publicity. The United States House of Representatives passed several resolutions on the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide since 1975, none of which, however, subsequently
passed in the Senate.75 Interestingly, even though these resolutions had emerged from the
awareness engendered by the wave of terrorist violence, they made no mention of this violence. In Paris in 1984, the Permanent People’s Tribunal, a civil society initiative established several years prior, convened a Session on the Genocide of the Armenians, and found “that the charge of genocide of the Armenian people brought against the Turkish authorities is established as to its
foundation in fact”.76 In 1987, the European Parliament approved a resolution that recognised the
events of 1915 as genocide.77 Outside of the political sphere, scholarship on the Armenian
Genocide also proliferated starting in the late 1970s, corresponding with the expansion of the
academic field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies.78 With the development of this political and
academic awareness, Armenian communities around the world found that their advocacy and lobbying efforts were no longer falling on deaf ears.
On the other hand, as the international community began to discuss commemorating or even recognising the Armenian Genocide, Turkey was forced to respond to these new developments. Since the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1922-1923, Turkey had lived under the assumption that the ‘Armenian problem’ had been resolved, and it was very much surprised
74 Paul Wilkinson, “Armenian Terrorism,” The World Today 39, no. 9 (September 1983): 349.
75 U.S. Congress, House, Joint resolution to designate April 24, 1975, as National Day of Remembrance of Man’s
Inhumanity, H. J. Res. 148, 94th Cong., introduced in House January 28, 1975,
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/94/hjres148
76 Gabrielle Simm, "The Paris Peoples' Tribunal and the Istanbul Trials: Archives of the Armenian Genocide,"
Leiden Journal of International Law 29, no. 1 (March 2016): 245-268.
77 European Parliament, “Resolution on a political solution to the Armenian question,” Doc. A2-33/87, June 18,
1987, https://www.armenian-genocide.org/Affirmation.152/current_category.7/affirmation_detail.html
by the JCAG and ASALA strikes on its diplomats half a century later. The Turkish populace, having been taught a mythologised version of their nation’s history, could not comprehend why these Armenian terrorist groups could possibly undertake such violence. The government was not immune to this either, having been caught off guard to the extent that the Foreign Ministry had not a single English-language text on the state position on the events of 1915 to send to
Western courts trying ASALA and JCAG perpetrators.79 However, very quickly, Turkey
solidified a position of proactive, hard denial on the topic, and began to exert pressure on organisations and governments considering recognising the genocide. For example, when the American government tried to propose to commemorate the Armenian Genocide throughout the 1980s, these attempts were met with widespread public outcry in Turkey, and the Turkish government threatened that the adoption of such a resolution would negatively affect the diplomatic relationship between the two states. The US took such a threat seriously, considering Turkey’s status as a NATO ally in the Middle East and bordering on the USSR. In addition, organisations directly or indirectly supported by the Turkish government endeavoured to spread information intended to shake the public’s confidence in the facts of the Armenian Genocide, especially with regards to the scope and intentionality of the violence. These combined efforts succeeded in making it so that it seemed that the interest of preserving positive relations with
Turkey outweighed any benefit or moral value derived from recognising the genocide.80 This
tactic, whereby Turkey spends enormous sums of money on creating denialist propaganda to manipulate the public opinion and threaten foreign governments with diplomatic repercussions if
they recognise the Armenian Genocide, continues to be used until this day.81
79 Fatma Müge Göçek, “Reading Genocide: Turkish Historiography on 1915,” in A Question of Genocide:
Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, eds. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman
M. Naimark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 42-45.
80 Vigen Guroian, “The Politics and Morality of Genocide,” in The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics,
ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (London: Macmillan, 1992), 311-339.
81 Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence Against the
Fig. 2. The number of publications in Turkey on the “Armenian question”, by Jennifer Dixon.82
The developments in the Armenian quest for justice up until our times show that this pursuit has had mixed results. On the one hand, as is evident from the subject of this thesis, Armenians still have not received any form of recognition or formal justice from the successors of the perpetrators of the genocide. In fact, one could argue that Turkey has only doubled down on its denial that any injustice took place at all, and it seems as unlikely as ever that it will reverse this uncompromising stance. On the other hand, I propose that taken separately, the steps on the road to justice carry with them valuable lessons in their own right. Certain parts of the Treaty of Sèvres and the Ottoman courts-martial could be seen as precursors, if not early attempts, at transitional justice, for example. We also see the significant role that Armenian
82 Jennifer Dixon, Number of official or quasi-official publications on the "Armenian question", 2010,
political organisations have played in shaping their communities’ struggle for justice, for better or for worse. Consider, for instance, the emergence of a second, deadlier terrorist organisation in response to the success of one that challenged the position of the ARF establishment. In addition, while the Turkish state seems increasingly unwilling to recognise the genocide, the same cannot be said for Turkish civil society, which birthed such initiatives as a (albeit highly controversial)
‘apology campaign’ in 2009.83 Where the state maintains a rigid, ideological denial in the face of
its national history, it would be incorrect to suggest that civil society universally and unquestioningly accepts this denial; on the contrary, oral history research shows that many people are aware of the events of the genocide, as recollections of (the perpetration of) these events have been passed down through generations. In the words of Uğur Ümit Üngör, “the
Turkish government is denying a genocide that its own population remembers.”84
Finally, we must reflect on how, not simply the genocide itself, but the pursuit of justice specifically has echoed through time and space and influenced our world. The Armenian Genocide happened at a time when no framework existed through which such traumatic events could be processed, and for the first few decades after it, the survivors had to find their own justice. What they did not yet know was that this would contribute to the creation of a conception of justice that would be considered normal a full century later. When through Operation Nemesis, Soghomon Tehlirian assassinated one of the men deemed most responsible for the genocide, Raphael Lemkin, who had been troubled by the massacres of the Armenians when he first heard of them several years prior, was already puzzled at the fact that no mechanism existed to punish large-scale, systematic violence. Having followed Tehlirian’s trial, he reflected later that “as a lawyer, I thought that a crime should not be punished by the victims but should be
punished by a court, by international law.”85 Lemkin’s interest in and concern over the fate of the
Armenians contributed to the creation of the word ‘genocide’ itself, as well as the international legal framework for the punishment of the crime. Ironic as it is, therefore, that the events that
83 Ayda Erbal, “Mea Culpas, Negotiations, Apologias: Revisiting the “Apology” of Turkish Intellectuals,” in
Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory: Transnational Initiatives in the 20th and 21st Century, ed.
Birgit Schwelling (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012), 51-94.
84 Uğur Ümit Üngör, “Lost in Commemoration: The Armenian Genocide in Memory and Identity,” Patterns of
Prejudice 48, no. 2 (2014): 157.
85 Raphael Lemkin, interview with Quincy Howe, February 13, 1949, CBS Television in conjunction with the
United Nations, DVD entitled, The United Nations Casebook, Chapter 21: Genocide, as cited in Peter Balakian, “Raphael Lemkin, Cultural Destruction, and the Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 27, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 59.
inspired the creator of the word ‘genocide’ are not recognised as genocide by the perpetrators over a century later, the survivors’ struggle for justice has nonetheless certainly not been in vain.
