The Armenian Genocide Legacy

Alexis Demirdjian

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137561633
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This volume focuses on the impact of the Armenian Genocide on different academic disciplines at the crossroads of the centennial commemorations of the Genocide. Its interdisciplinary nature offers the opportunity to analyze the Genocide from different angles using the lens of several fields of study.

Part I

Now and Then: Historical Perspectives on the Armenian Catastrophe

1

The Armenian Genocide in the Context of 20th-Century Paramilitarism

Uğur Ümit Üngör¹

Introduction

Genocide can be defined as a complex process of systematic persecution and annihilation of a group of people by a government. In the 20th century, approximately 40 to 60 million defenceless people became victims of deliberate genocidal policies. The beginning of the 21st century has not shown signs of improvement, with genocidal episodes flaring up in Darfur, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, and Syria. Genocide can best be understood as the persecution and destruction of human beings on the basis of their presumed or imputed membership in a group, rather than on their individual properties or participation in certain acts.

Although it is unnecessary to quantify genocide, it is clear that a genocidal process always concerns a society at large, and that genocide destroys a significant and critical part of the affected communities. It can be argued that genocidal processes are particularly malicious and destructive because they are directed against all members of a group, mostly innocent and defenceless civilians persecuted and killed regardless of their behavior. Genocide always denotes a colossal and brutal collective criminality and for this reason, it is a phenomenon that is distinct from other forms of mass violence such as war, civil war, or massacre.²

Genocide is a complex process with several important transitions from non-violent conflict to (civil) war, through to genocide. The transition from crisis to mass violence is a point of no return where serious moral and political transgressions occur in a rapid process of violent polarization. Comparative research on mass political violence demonstrates that once unleashed, it can develop its own dynamic and become nearly unstoppable by internal forces – reaching ‘relative autonomy’. This dynamic consists of a routinization of the killing, and a moral shift in society due to mass impunity.

Two other key variables are the political elite’s decision-making and the organization of violence. The first is conducted in secret sessions, develops fitfully, and comes to light only retroactively, once the victims are killed. Indeed, brutal conflicts expose the criminology of violent political elites, who begin operating as an organized crime group with growing mutual complicity developing among them. Secondly, the organization of violence, another major analytical category is carried out according to clear and logical divisions of labor: between the civil and military wing of the state, but also crucially between the military and paramilitary groups. The killing process has the dual function of at once annihilating the victim group and constructing the perpetrator group. The destruction of the Other is the validation of the Self.³

This chapter focuses on an important aspect of genocidal processes: paramilitary units that are spawned and organized by the political elites to carry out violence against victim groups. It opens with a conceptual discussion of paramilitary units in the 20th century, and then moves to an examination of Ottoman-Turkish paramilitary units during the Armenian Genocide.

To be sure, such units played a significant role in the actual perpetration of the mass killings in the Genocide, but they are not necessarily central to its causation or even course. Wartime escalation, ethnic nationalism, and long-term planning were much more central to the genocide, but many of its perpetrators were Turkish, Kurdish and Caucasian paramilitaries. This chapter focuses on how they were mobilized and deployed in the massacres.

Paramilitarism

Paramilitarism refers to clandestine, irregular armed organizations that carry out illegal acts of violence against clearly defined civilian individuals or groups. The concept is key to understanding the processes of violence that play out during ethnic conflicts, which see the formation of paramilitary units conducting counterinsurgency operations,⁴ scorched earth campaigns, and violence against civilians including genocide.⁵ Paramilitary units captured the Western imagination when they appeared in Serbia and Turkey during the ethnic conflicts of the 1990s. Armed groups such as the Serbian Volunteer Guard and the Turkish Gendarmerie Intelligence Organization (JITEM) were responsible for widespread violations of human rights. Preliminary investigation of these paramilitary units revealed two puzzling patterns: they maintained close links with political elites, including heads of state, and they were largely drawn from the social milieu of organized crime.⁶ How can we understand this conundrum?

Paramilitarism seems to be most fruitfully examined through the prism of the interplay between organized crime, the dynamic of violent conflict, and the state. This chapter historicizes the development of paramilitary groups in the collapsing Ottoman Empire as they emerged, functioned, and disappeared. It aims to challenge dominant interpretations that paramilitarism is a function of weak states. Instead, it can also be interpreted in the context of the power of states to outsource and subcontract illegal and illegitimate violence against civilians, with a view to placing a buffer between the perpetration of crimes and the political or military elite.

Paramilitary units have four distinguishing characteristics that make them unique within the spectrum of ways of organizing violence. First, they are different from private militias and terrorists: unlike paramilitaries, the former are not state-orchestrated and the latter are anti-systemic. Second, paramilitary units are secretive and covert organizations, but nevertheless carry out very public violence: they torture, kill their victims openly, and with widespread notoriety.⁷ Third, they leave no visible indication that they exercise legitimate use of force that is traceable up the hierarchy of a state-sanctioned chain of command. Since the monopoly of legitimate violence is a vital characteristic of states, by resorting to paramilitarism governments potentially compromise that monopoly and undermine their legitimacy.⁸

Finally, states benefit from relying on these groups and individuals as it provides them with plausible deniability: they can disavow any linkage with these shadowy organizations by claiming they were private groups committing violence of their own volition.⁹ Deniability is considered necessary not only for domestic reasons (electorate, institutions), but also for fear of international sanction, including the threat of foreign intervention, monitoring by NGOs, the UN, international criminal tribunals and the EU, and embargos.¹⁰

Comparative research suggests that paramilitary units generally do not necessarily consist of ideologically committed soldiers steeped in ethnic hatred, but of men with a prior career in organized crime. This requires thorough attention because it has played an important role in many conflicts. The extensive literature on modern organized crime in the most diverse societies converges on three characteristics that define these criminal groups: first, they are businesses that adopt the practices of legitimate corporations while dealing in illicit commodities and services and second, they are secret societies that conduct their operations covertly.¹¹ Third, and most importantly, in certain countries and contexts organized crime structures have historically colluded with states and influential political forces that have supported and benefited from them.¹²

Criminals’ involvement in paramilitary units can account for their conduct, dynamic and recruitment. A burgeoning body of research suggests that the interplay between organized crime and politics can profoundly affect democracy: it can force elected governments to resign or change policy.¹³ Moreover, it undermines the rule of law by increasing crime in wartime and post-war society, as territories of low-intensity warfare provide safe havens in which paramilitaries extract resources through trafficking, gambling and money laundering.¹⁴

This chapter will depart from conventional approaches by developing a transnational and comparative perspective. The subject of paramilitary violence offers a useful prism through which to investigate genocidal processes. This chapter will argue that the collapse of state authority and functioning monopolies of violence at the end and in the aftermath of the First World War provided political elites and paramilitary warlords (known as fedayis) with a unique window of opportunity to establish or consolidate power in these post-imperial shatter-zones. It will focus on the roots and rationale of paramilitary violence rather than inter-state warfare of standing armies in this period. How and why were paramilitary units established? What role did they play in the violence that engulfed these territories in the long war? What was the relationship between the state and the paramilitaries?

The chapter discusses the establishment and functioning of paramilitary units, and the violence they committed against Armenian civilians. It will review how the Ottoman government established paramilitary units during the First World War, focusing on the ‘Special Organization’ (Tes¸kilât-ı Mahsusa) units that were deployed for various operations outside and inside the empire, including the destruction of Armenians.

Ottoman-Turkish paramilitaries and the First World War

Paramilitarism was not a product of the First World War but had a long prehistory. It became more and more prevalent in the Balkans in the late 19th century, as various paramilitary groups became engaged in combating each other under conditions strongly reminiscent of a low-intensity civil war.¹⁵ Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serb, Greek and Muslim bands engaged in skirmishes to protect their own interlocking clusters of extended families, for ideological reasons, or to exact revenge for prior losses or injustice. With only a limited grip on the peripheries, the Ottoman state grappled desperately with these conflicts and resorted to alternative sources of power.¹⁶

Pacifying these conflicts was extremely difficult because the levels of brutalization were exceedingly high: too much blood had been shed for a successful de-escalation, for example by effecting reconciliation. The conflicts took on the dynamic of vendettas. For example, whenever Muslim bands killed Bulgarians, they would leave a letter addressed to the local district governor that would read: ‘This person has been killed in order to avenge the Muslim killed at such and such place’.¹⁷ Internal correspondence of the CUP sheds ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword by Dr Ronald Suny
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Note to the Reader
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Now and Then: Historical Perspectives on the Armenian Catastrophe
• Part II What Does Law Have to Do with It? Legal Remedies and Judicial Explanations
• Part III A Century of Denial
• Part IV Going Back to My Roots: What is an Armenian Today?
• Part V The Catastrophe’s Legacy
• Bibliography
• Index