Tracing European Ethnic Cleansing Back to the Ottoman Empire | A Brief History of Things

Wind the clock back and the root becomes visible: when multiethnic states such as Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I and nation-states rose in their place, the call to build ethnically uniform countries turned minorities at home into targets.

People once took Hitler's slaughter of the Jews for an evil that appeared out of nowhere. It became clear over time that Nazi party members on their own could not have wiped out more than six million Jews so quickly and so efficiently — that the credit also belonged to ordinary Germans who, knowingly or not, cooperated with the Nazis, a case of the "banality of evil."

Then came a more awkward discovery: across the European continent during World War II, the governments and populations of a good many countries took part in the persecution of Jews to one degree or another. Some joined the killing directly; others hunted Jews down and loaded them onto trains for the camps in batches. Beyond a deep-rooted fear and hatred of Jews, their motive was almost always to make their own nation's ethnic makeup more "pure" — and the cleansing did not stop at Jews. It reached nearly every other group held to be "not of our kin, and therefore sure to be of a different heart."

None of these new findings by historians is meant to soften or excuse what Hitler and his circle did. They are an attempt to dig out the sources of European ethnic cleansing, buried deep in the past. Wind the clock back and the root becomes visible: when multiethnic states such as Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I and nation-states rose in their place, the call to build ethnically uniform countries turned minorities at home into targets.

In fact, long before these old empires fell, ethnic cleansing was already a standard weapon — for the nationalists trying to break away and found nation-states, and for the men trying to hold the empires together. Nowhere was this plainer than in the Ottoman Empire. It was in the independence movements of the Balkan peoples, led by the Greeks, and of the Armenians of eastern Anatolia, that ethnic cleansing became a recurring performance, one the European powers egged on with their favoritism and their selective blindness.

In 1821 Greek nationalists crossed into Moldavia and raised a revolt. It failed, because the local Romanian peasants leaned toward the Ottoman Turks. A second rising broke out at the same time on the Morea peninsula, where the Greeks massacred the Muslim population of Corinth on a large scale, sparing not even women and children. Word of the killing reached Istanbul before long.

The Ottoman Empire took swift and brutal revenge on the Greeks, and the reprisals spread to the nearby island of Chios. News of them traveled far: The Massacre at Chios, by the celebrated painter Eugène Delacroix, is famous almost everywhere, its canvas crowded with scenes of butchery and with savage-looking Turkish soldiers.

From then on the picture of Greeks oppressed and abused by the Ottoman Turks lodged itself in the public mind, while the many Muslim victims were selectively forgotten.

Greece won independence in 1832. That stirred hopes of independence among many Balkan peoples, and it poisoned their relations with the local Muslims, with whom they had lived peacefully for centuries. Beyond that, the spillover from the successive Russo-Turkish wars began to shake the peace of the Balkans.

Tatar and Circassian refugees from those wars reached the Bulgarian lands and merged with the local Muslim Pomaks. These Muslims had lived there for centuries and had, on the whole, kept good relations with their Christian neighbors. But relations between the Circassian refugees and the Bulgarians were badly strained — as strained as those between the refugees of eastern Anatolia and the Armenians. Afraid of being driven onto the road again, the Circassians massacred local Christians. The "atrocities" in Bulgaria caused an uproar in Western European opinion, which read them as nothing less than a repeat of Chios.

In 1866 Greek nationalists rose in revolt on Crete. Muslims made up nearly a third of the island's population, but the Greek nationalists there wanted union with Greece, and the Greek insurgents killed Muslims on a large scale. The revolt was put down; the nationalists were bound to come back.

Russia's aggressive new push in the east gave birth to the Armenian independence movement. In the Russo-Turkish war of 1876, the Russian eastern army struck mainly at the South Caucasus and sought a foothold in eastern Anatolia. This land had once belonged to the ancient kingdom of Armenia, and there the Russians set up the Erivan governorate, roughly today's Armenia, and treated it as an important Christian outpost. In doing so they cleared out most of the Muslim natives — chiefly Circassians, Kurds, Azerbaijanis and Persianized Turkic peoples. Some hundreds of thousands of them died on overcrowded ships and in other brutal conditions, while the surviving refugees gathered in eastern Anatolia. Kurdish nomads suffered the same treatment: they fled in winter to Armenian villages, hoping to make a living there. These refugees competed with the local Armenians for land, and relations grew steadily worse.

After the Treaty of Berlin was signed in 1878, the Ottoman Empire faced ethnic wars on more and more fronts. The Bulgarians founded their own Christian nation-state, and Serbia did much the same. Ethnic cleansing came in wave after wave, mosques were destroyed, and the Muslims of these regions fled in every direction. Austria's occupation of Bosnia and Britain's of Cyprus produced still more Muslim refugees.

Close to a million Muslim refugees were driven out of the Crimean peninsula, the Balkans and the Caucasus, and nearly a third of them died of poverty and disease with no one paying any attention. It was the clash between these refugees and the Armenians of eastern Anatolia that, more than anything else, produced the Armenian question.

Serious fighting broke out in the Armenian lands in the late 1880s. In 1891 the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II began using Kurds against Armenians. Under the banner of Islamic unity, he opened an institution in Istanbul called the Tribal School, which existed to give the sons of Kurdish chieftains a "civilized" education. He also recruited horsemen from those tribes and formed them into the Hamidiye regiments. In 1894 these Kurdish cavalrymen and the Armenians clashed on a large scale at a place called Sasun.

Local missionaries staged protests under banners reading "Armenian massacre." They accused Abdul Hamid II of carrying out the first "genocidal massacre" and put the Armenian dead at 300,000. The French historian François Georgeon and his British colleague Andrew Mango investigated and concluded that the real number killed in the massacre was thirty thousand. They added that while massacres did take place in some Armenian provinces, the governors of others stopped anything similar from happening.

In August 1896 came a terrorist attack in Istanbul: Armenian nationalists slipped into the Ottoman Bank in Galata, killed a number of people, took hostages and threatened to blow up the whole building. After long negotiations they left the Ottoman Empire aboard the French ambassador's yacht. Istanbul's Muslims were furious, and the wave of persecution that followed killed hundreds of Armenians, by some counts thousands. After that the Armenian independence movement went quiet.

The front then shifted back to the Balkans. In 1897 a small war broke out on Crete. The Ottoman Turks won it, but British pressure left Crete independent in all but name. The Greeks then carried out "ethnic cleansing," expelling Muslims with great cruelty and killing on a large scale.

In October 1912 the Balkan states attacked the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Turkish army fell back on every front and a huge wave of refugees followed. Trotsky, who was there, recorded some of the horrors: women, children and the old driven out of their villages, every young man killed, while Orthodox priests and Slavic professors, full of nationalist passion, urged the Balkan nationalists on.

But the greatest threat still came from the Armenians. The Ottoman collapse in the Balkans and North Africa left the empire coming apart as a whole, and Armenian nationalists began to move as well. Armenian independence fighters carried out assassination after assassination, and in 1912 they killed the mayor of Van. The mayor was himself an Armenian, and he had warned the nationalists again and again that the cause they were chasing would end in tears. Their movement had Russian backing; Russia smuggled weapons across the border into their hands.

The final collapse came during World War I. In March and April 1915 Russia attacked eastern Anatolia. The Armenian position turned perilous. The Russian army contained four Armenian brigades, and the Armenian Orthodox patriarch, who lived in Russian Armenia and was recognized by the tsar, called on all Armenians to rise against the Ottoman Empire. The rising finally broke out around Lake Van; local Muslims were killed and Muslim towns destroyed.

In late April 1915, again around Lake Van, Armenians attacked Ottoman rear-area signal units and wrecked their transmission equipment. The government responded by rounding up prominent Armenians in Istanbul and handing them to the Interior Ministry for interrogation; some of them were killed. The empire then issued a decree emptying the military zone of Armenians. Tens of thousands were forced to move to other settlement areas, mainly in northern Syria.

Kurdish and Arab tribes attacked these Armenians. Massacres took place during the forced migration, and they are well documented, but whether they were carried out on the orders of the Ottoman government is disputed to this day. As Bernard Lewis, the scholar of Middle Eastern and Turkish history, put it, if the "Armenian genocide" means the series of massacres of 1915, then the victims of those massacres must include Muslims too. When the Ottoman army was forced to retreat, Muslims in the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia were driven out and killed in turn. After Russian troops took a large stretch of territory that included Erzurum and Trabzon, Armenians went on to massacre the local Muslim population. Across the whole of eastern Anatolia the population was at one point all but wiped out.

Turkey was defeated in 1919, and the victors meant to carve up the Ottoman Empire. With Allied support the Greeks occupied parts of Smyrna and began expelling the Ottoman Turks, at times with extraordinary cruelty. The Armenians, too, dreamed of a Greater Armenia running from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. They took Kars, the key town of eastern Anatolia, and marched on Trabzon and Erzurum. Armenian ambition, and the aggressive offensives and ethnic cleansing that came with it, forced the Muslims, Kurds among them, to close ranks. Facing the threat of national extinction, they drew closer to one another than ever before and gathered tightly around the Turkish nationalists led by Kemal.

In 1920 the Bolsheviks won the Russian civil war. Badly worried about a joint intervention by the great powers and in urgent need of outside support, they made an ally of Kemal's government — even at the Armenians' expense. Soviet gold and weapons crossed the Black Sea into Turkey, and the effect showed first on the eastern front: the Armenians collapsed along its whole length. As far back as 1915, the deputy viceroy of Russia's Caucasus had said that the Turks would help them get what they wanted most: an Armenia without too many Armenians.

Kemal's Turkish National Army then beat the Greek army on the western front. By 1924 the dust had settled. Hatred between Turks and Greeks had grown so deep that the two peoples could no longer live together, so the two countries exchanged populations. About 500,000 Muslims left Greece for Turkey and a million Greeks left Turkey for Greece, and a whole generation in both countries suffered for it. Next it would be the turn of the European continent to endure genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Recommended reading: A Short History of Turkey

Cover image: The Massacre at Chios by Eugène Delacroix. Source: Wikipedia

How does an object become a globalized commodity? How does an object drive globalization? And how is an object manufactured on a global scale? The column "A Brief History of Things" starts from "objects," looking at how these "objects" have permeated our lives and changed our world.

Topics it has covered include: shipping containers, railroads, water, Disney, climate, discounts, T-shirts, nautical charts, warriors, tea, spices, opium, coffee, timber, used clothing, trade, soybeans, IKEA, Arabia, corn, hotels, gold, disease, silver, fur, oil, natural gas, Western civilization, the railroad stock wars, automobiles, luxury goods, poverty, antibiotics, the Swiss tourism industry, General Electric, cable TV, advertising, Discovery Channel, merchants, car models, the yuan, missionaries, guano, Amway, adventurers, the steam engine, addiction, shipping routes, cotton, eggplant, the Huguang-fills-Sichuan migration, the Nicaragua Canal, FAW-Volkswagen, bathing, New York, agriculture, alliances, HSBC, mountaineering, ports, cotton cloth, the euro, Amazon's "priority delivery", weeding, tea theft, scrap, "Zara syndrome", wilderness culture, Matteo Ricci's map, the convert Shen Fuzong, the Black Death, cod, human genes, migrating to Southeast Asia, red-barbarian cannons, barbarians in economics, the welfare state, herbal medicine in Western medicine, machine guns, tin tanks, smallpox, ISIS, the Cold War, sports, overseas Chinese, the Battle of Waterloo, Zhukov, Republican-era political parties, the East India Company, artillery, Stilwell, innovation, the Pacific War, the Opium War, "Western Shock", Chinese food, Europe, Prussia, Arab nationalism, the Middle East wars, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the financial crisis, Chinese youth tour groups to Japan, air pollution, The Internationale, Volkswagen, the "Jiang Qing dress", the Manchus, teamwork, Japanese industrial policy, appeasement, the Nazis, coal, World War I, the collapse of the Soviet Union, lawsuit marketing, "Collecting China", ballots, Indian independence, tea sterilization, Captain Sully, populism, Portuguese expeditions, Brzezinski, the Turkish empire, the Afghan war, 9/11, China-Japan relations, the fabi currency reform, red currency, Connectography, the pushback of domestic goods, the August 19 incident, street protests, the Qing government's market bailout, Japan's underclass, the fates of the Nationalists and Communists, the "Punish Vietnam" diplomatic war, the Taiping Rebellion, the Qin and Han empires, the Tibet question, the British Empire, Stalin, Kublai Khan's "capital region", the wokou pirates, democracy in wartime, MacArthur's legacy, brandy, rum, and modern America, Soviet cinema, the Ottoman Empire, young Stalin, the foreign-run customs service, the Soong family, 1916, vegetarianism in Asia, the divide between Europe and America, late-Qing newspapermen, Afghanistan, Qing finances in Xinjiang, the Genghis Khan exchange, German nationalism, the Qing empire, royal hunts, America 1927, the electricity war, rust, sleep, the Vietnam War, Reagan, ruins, the May Thirtieth Movement, the partition of Palestine, Israel, Bridgewater Associates, post-industrial cities, The Wealth of Nations, World War I, 1950s America, U.S. naval warfare, Microsoft, cloud computing, nationalism, automation, the English Revolution, Istanbul, World War I……