This week I had the opportunity to attend a guest lecture at Boston College by Turkish professor Taner Akçam about the religious and ethnic cleansing in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was providential that someone saw it advertised in the newspaper and recommended it and again that I was free on a weeknight that was supposed to be busy.
His presentation was very interesting for a couple of reasons. First because rather than focus on violence committed against different groups separately, his study is the first major attempt to look at all of the events together, from the end of the last Russo-Turkish war in 1877-78 until the formation of the Turkish Republic in 1924. The Empire unexpectedly lost 90% of its European land (including the home region of all the CUP elite) and was faced with the influx of thousands of displaced Muslims, and their solution was to implement forced assimilation throughout the remainder of the Empire, mainly through forcibly moving the native populations. He examined everything from the exportation of ethnic Greeks from western Anatolia in 1912-13 to the Armenian and Assyrian Genocides in 1914-18 and the Pontic Greek Genocide in 1922-23, but also concurrent movements of Kurds, Arabs, Circassians, and Balkan Turkish refugees in Anatolia and how the methods of the government evolved or were adapted for different groups.
The second interesting thing was a document he found in the Ottoman Archives directing regional governments to take detailed censuses and conduct population movements and exterminations based on these; the central government directed that no minority (any non-Turkish group including other Muslims) should constitute more than 5-10% of the population in a given area. Thus, widespread killing and deportation would often be halted abruptly when this goal was reached. His main example was the Armenian population deported to northern Syria and Iraq, which at its height was nearly two million in an area with a native population of 1.5-2 million. When death camps such as Deir Zor were abruptly abandoned and extermination discontinued, the surviving Armenian population was almost exactly 150,000.
He alluded to other documents discovered that were beyond the scope of this presentation, but he has published a new book recently and has another due to be released in a year or two.
This event is part of a series concerning Christianity in the Middle East sponsored by Christian Solidarity International, which has included several events in Europe and will continue in this country throughout the year. All of the lectures are video recorded and are available online here, so this lecture should be posted as well soon.
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