Book review: New history of the Christian genocide during the Ottoman Empire
by Morris-Zeevi
Reviewed by Robert Fisk
Israeli historian Benny Morris doesn’t do
things by half. The footnotes of his new book on the 30-year genocide of
Christians by their Turkish rulers, cowritten with his colleague Dror Zeevi,
take up more than a fifth of the 640-page work. “It was nine years, a long
haul,” he admitted to me this week, with an audible sigh over the phone. And he
talks about the involvement of Ataturk in the later stages of the genocide of
around 2.5 million Christians of the Ottoman empire; how “religions do drive
people to excessive violence” – he has in mind the Turks, Isis, the Crusades –
and even condemns the Arabs for their inability to criticise themselves.
The mere title of the Morris-Zeevi book,
The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities
1894-1924, is going to have the Turks enraged, from Erdogan down. The Armenians
and other Christians will dispute his apparent claim that he has only just
discovered that their slaughter lasted for 30 years – others have talked of the
Armenian genocide of 1915 bookended by the late 19th-century massacres in
Turkey and the post-1915 killing of surviving Armenians and Greeks, Assyrians
and others. And the Arab world will challenge his view that the holocaust (my
word) of Christians was more motivated by Islam than Turkish nationalism.
Having written about the genocide of the
Armenians for 35 years, I have doubts that the actual call for “jihad” in the
Turkish Ottoman empire unleashed at the start of the First World War was as
ferocious as Morris makes it out to be. Muftis were indeed told they were in a
holy war against Christians – but not against German Christians,
Austro-Hungarian Christians, neutral Christians or allies of the Central Powers
(Bulgaria, for example). Many Muslim worshippers, sitting on the carpets of
mosque floors, must have shaken their heads in puzzlement at these caveats.
Well, one way was to notice the German officers training the Ottoman army, the
German diplomats and businessmen who witnessed the genocide of the Armenians
with their own eyes, and wrote home about it. Hitler asked his generals who now
remembered the Armenians just before invading Poland in 1939.
But again and again, I was brought up short
by the sheer, terrible, shocking accounts of violence in Morris’s and
Zeevi’s work. “Strident religiosity” moved through the Muslim lands, write the
authors....
see also
Samuel
Osborne-Armenian genocide: Thousands march to demand
recognition for atrocity
