The Armenians desperately want their tragedy to be seen much in the same light as the world sees the Nazi attempt to exterminate the European Jews
It is with great reluctance that I write about the Armenian genocide, as I know from experience that what I say will infuriate both sides. But it is the 100th anniversary of the catastrophe this month, and Pope Francis has just declared that the mass killing of Armenian citizens of the Ottoman empire in 1915 was indeed a genocide. Turkey, predictably, has responded by withdrawing its Ambassador from the Vatican.
Ages ago, when I was a history graduate student doing research about Turkey's role in World War I, I got into the Turkish General Staff archives in Ankara and found the actual telegrams (written in the old riqa script) that went back and forth between Istanbul and eastern Anatolia in the spring of 1915. There was an Armenian genocide. Of course there was. When up to 800,000 people from a single ethnic and religious community die from violence, hunger or exposure in a short time, and they are under guard by armed men from a different ethnicity and religion at the time, it's an open-and-shut case. (Today's Armenians say 1.5 million died in 1915, but that's too high. It could be as few as half a million, but 800,000 is plausible.)
On the other hand, the Armenians desperately want their tragedy to be seen in the same light as the Nazi attempt to exterminate the European Jews, and won't settle for anything less. But what happened to the Armenians was not pre-planned by the Turkish Government, and there was provocation from the Armenian side. That doesn't remotely begin to justify what happened, but it does put the Turks in a somewhat different light.
A group of junior officers called the Young Turks seized control of the Ottoman empire in 1908, and their leader, Enver Pasha, foolishly took the empire into World War I at Germany's side in November 1914. He then led a Turkish Army east to attack Russia, which was allied to Britain and France. That Army was destroyed in the deep snow around Kars — only 10 per cent of it got back to base — and the Turks panicked. The Russians didn't follow right away (poor generalship) but the Turks had almost nothing left to stop them if they did. The Turks scrambled to put some kind of defensive line together, but behind them in eastern Anatolia were Christian Armenians who had been agitating for independence from the empire for decades.
Various revolutionary Armenian groups had been in touch with Moscow, offering to stage uprisings behind the Turkish army when Russian troops arrived in Anatolia. learning that the Turks had retreated in disarray, some groups assumed the Russians were on their way and jumped the gun. Similarly, the Armenian revolutionary groups further south, near the Mediterranean coast, were in contact with the British command in Egypt, and had promised an uprising to coincide with planned British landings on the Turkish south coast near Adana. Quite late in the day the British switched their planned invasion much further west to Gallipoli, but once again some of the Armenian revolutionaries didn't get the message in time and rebelled anyway.
The Kurds shared eastern Anatolia with the Armenians, but the neighbours had never been friendly. So many of the Kurdish escorts assumed they had free licence to rape, steal and kill. And between that, with the lack of food, and the inclement weather, up to half the deportees died. To the extent that the Turkish Government knew about it, it did nothing to stop the disaster.