Armenian aspirations
Roger Cooper Since 1975, some 21 Turkish diplomats, including family members, have been assassinated by members of ASALA, the acronym of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia. Earlier this Month 12 travellers, two of them non- Turks, were killed at Ankara airport in a bomb attack for which Armenian na- tionalists have claimed responsibility. The best explanation for ASALA's sinister work is curiously to be found in words ascribed to Hitler, justifying in 1939 his orders for the genocide of the Poles. 'It is only in this Manner that we can acquire the vital ter- ritory which we need. After all, who remembers the extermination of the Arme- nians?'
Who does indeed? Non-Turkish historians are close to unanimity in recor- ding that from 1915 to 1918 some 1.5 Million Armenians died as the direct result of Ottoman action. Eye-witness accounts Make it clear that while 250,000 male Arme- nians were serving in the Sultan's army the community's intellectual elite were arrested, deported and murdered as the first stage of What must be called genocide, in keeping with the dominant Young Turk Party's ultra-nationalist policies. In hundreds of villages in eastern Anatolia, the homeland of the Armenians for two thousand years before the arrival of the first Turks, the men were rounded up and shot, the women and children forced to walk southwards in huge convoys which few survived. Along the Black Sea coast Armenians were taken out in boats and thrown overboard.
Final solutions never seem to work, and some half a million refugees from Anatolia survived to found, or swell, the Armenian communities that now exist in most Middle Eastern countries, as well as in Europe and North America. Their world-wide popula- tion was estimated in 1966 at 5.5 million, 3.5 million of whom live in the Soviet Union. Only 250,000 live in Turkey, about an eighth of the pre-1914 figure.
Like the Kurds and Afghans in Asia and, one might add, the Basques and Swiss in Europe, the Armenians have for most of their history suffered by living in moun- tainous, land-locked areas, inhabitants of Inherently poor territory that was never- theless constantly disputed by their more Powerful neighbours. Like the Kurds and Afghans, they have enjoyed brief periods of regional power, but their claim to nation- hood depends more on a distinctive culture than on memories of imperial splen- dour. The Diaspora, as they call it, has af- fected more than their ethnography. Deprived of their traditional lands, they have moved from peasant agriculture to Commerce and the professions, even in Soviet Armenia, where the terrain is mostly unsuitable for farming (leeches were once a major export).
Britain, Russia and France all disap- pointed Armenian aspirations. Turkey, after all, was the Sick Man of Europe, with Britain the principal physician, for much of the period of Armenian persecution, which began as early as 1878. Far from getting the systematic support they might have ex- pected from their co-religionists, the Arme- nians became pawns in the Western flank of the Anglo-Russian Great Game. Under the secret Convention of Cyprus the Sultan ef- fectively recognised Britain's right to pro- tect the Armenians yet, as the 1929 En- cyclopaedia Britannica charmingly puts it: `Lord Salisbury both admitted and denied British obligations.' The Armenians, a Christian minority in a Muslim empire, suf- fered from this ambiguity, as well as from the equally ambivalent Russian attitude. To the ordinary Muslim Ottoman, and especially to the nationalist politicians and fanatical mullahs, the' Armenians were a dangerous fifth column. France, with fewer axes to grind, might have been more helpful, but was apathetic to British at- tempts to obtain a European consensus on what had now become 'the Armenian Ques- tion'. There was scope, particularly when France assumed control of the areas to which the Armenian survivors had mostly fled, for supportive action, but French plans to make an Armenian homeland of Cilicia, the region of southern Turkey where many Armenians had settled, were abandoned in 1921.
The post-war Treaty of Sevres promised both the Kurds and the Armenians indepen- dent statehood in the restructuring of the Ottoman provinces, but the nearest the lat- ter got to one was the establishment late in 1920 of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, far smaller in territory and population than Armenia proper. The Kurds, without major territorial claims in the Russian Empire, got nothing. This ac- counts for the generally positive attitude towards the Soviet Union, even among the most bourgeois Armenian communities of the West.
Of all those involved, the Americans emerge from the Armenian tragedy with the cleanest hands. President Woodrow Wilson was always a staunch supporter of Arme- nian rights, and in 1920 delineated a fron- tier between Turkey and a proposed in- dependent Armenia. But post-war apathy and isolationism effectively ruled out the great-power guarantees on which the em- bryonic state would have depended, and a resurgent Turkish Republic soon halted Soviet expansion and extinguished hopes for an independent Armenia on former Ot- toman territory. Further internal realignments prevented such traditional Armenian districts as Nakhchevan and Karabagh from being incorporated in the Soviet Republic.
Despite its Marxist ideology, ASALA finds ready audiences for its propaganda outside the Armenian churches of Kensington and the fashionable districts of Paris. This is partly because the Armenian Church, or at least its followers, has always been ethnical- ly rather than spiritually oriented, its priests padres rather than pastors, unwilling to preach cheek-turning. But if ASALA'S appeal to middle-class Armenians is stronger than one might expect it is not difficult to see why younger members of the community are attracted. The first generation of the Diaspora was too busy surviving to think of much else, the second learned to adapt and gravitate socially and economically up- wards, but kept the folk-memories alive. The third generation, today's, often fully integrated into their Western or Levantine foster-societies, seems to face an identity crisis. To a tiny minority, but one the ma- jority silently approves, has fallen the task of unravelling their origins and avenging their grandparents by attacking Turkish diplomats (and for the fainter-hearted such targets as Turkish airline offices). Young Armenians everywhere are researching their roots, relearning the distinctive Armenian language — and failing to denounce ASALA's despicable deeds.
What can be salvaged from this sorry mess? At first sight, little. Turkey is still intent on refusing to acknowledge the skeletons in its Ottoman cupboard. There is a flourishing academic industry there aimed at minimising the size of the pre-1914 Armenian population (and thereby casting doubt on the numbers massacred), building lup the fifth-column theory, and showing that the Armenians were themselves guilty of atrocities. But outside Turkey this view of history is rejected. (An American pro- fessor who espoused it lost his tenure at UCLA last year.) The Armenian lobby, though less powerful than the Jewish one, is beginning to be heard in the United States, but the chances of Turkey ever being forced to provide an autonomous homeland for the Armenians are slim indeed. The need to placate Turkey as a vital component of NATO has always carried more weight in US ruling circles, and any realistic analysis of ASALA must conclude that its efforts are counter-productive. A second autonomous Armenia would anyway be unviable without Soviet support, and would sooner or later be merged with or annexed by Soviet Armenia.
The attitude of the Russians is once again ambiguous. They have repeatedly denied territorial ambitions in Turkey and condemned the assassinations. Never- theless, ASALA'S political stance is close to Soviet thinking on many issues, and the at- tempts to discredit NATO and radicalise Armenian communities in the West must
surely be welcomed by the Kremlin.
An unpleasant twist to the story is the allegation that Turkey is ill-treating its Armenian citizens by harassing community efforts in educational and cultural fields. I have seen the neglect and misuse which are slowly destroying Armenian monuments in eastern Anatolia. The Turkish government denies these charges and has published statements from prominent Armenians in support. Turkey's record on human rights has received a bad press in Europe (not always fairly) and is certain to be brought up again when the question of entry into the EEC is raised, as it certainly will be once civilian rule is restored. If the Turks have nothing to hide about their Armenians some kind of independent fact-finding mission would surely be beneficial.
The last word must go to France, where the Armenian vote is a powerful factor. Speaking at a ceremony honouring those who died in 1915, Gaston Defferre, the Minister of the Interior and mayor of Marseilles, said recently that the French government recognised that the Armenian people had been victims of genocide and would help ensure that 'their cause would triumph'. But he was clearly speaking of a spiritual triumph, not endorsing territorial claims against Turkey. And he added a vital condition for this support: France would not condone violence. Any Armenian act of terrorism, he warned, would alienate the French government. An apology for past wrongs might be bitter medicine for the Turks to swallow, but it might be the only lasting cure for the disease.
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