Routledge’s prestigious journal “Middle East Critique” dedicated its issue on World War One and the Armenian Case.
At the Editor’s Note, Middle East Critique editor Eric Hooglund stated that they are dedicating the Summer issue of the journal to World War One on the 100th anniversary, with Prof Hakan Yavuz as the Special Issue Guest Editor, because “major political consequence”s of WW1 still effect us today, one of which is “less well-known issue” of the Turco-Armenian conflict.
Middle East Critique is classified as a “A*” journal by the Australian Research Council for its Excellence in Research for Australia initiative, placing it in the top 5% of journals in the “Humanities and Creative Arts” cluster.
You can buy this special issue at Routledge’s website .
List of the Articles on This Issue is as Follows :
(click on the links to read the abstracts)
- Orientalism, the ‘Terrible Turk’ and Genocide by Hakan Yavuz
Western Interventions and Formation of the Young Turks’ Siege Mentality by Murat Kaya
The Impact of the Balkan Wars on Ottoman History Writing: Searching for a Soul by Ebru Boyar
The Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa and World War I by Yucel Yigit
The ‘Bon Pour L’Orient’ Front: Analysis of Russia’s Anticipated Victory over the Ottoman Empire in World War I by Ozan Arslan
The Waning of Empires: The British, the Ottomans and the Russians in the Caucasus and North Iran, 1917–1921 by Peter Sluggett
What Color Is Your Shame? Orientalizing ‘Crime Against Humanity’ and Guilt by Mehmet Arisan
Narrating the Memories of Ermeni Mezalimi by Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler
Turkish Historiography of the First World War by Omer Turan
Abstracts of the Articles
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Orientalism, the ‘Terrible Turk’ and Genocide by Hakan Yavuz
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Western Interventions and Formation of the Young Turks’ Siege Mentality by Murat Kaya
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The Impact of the Balkan Wars on Ottoman History Writing: Searching for a Soul by Ebru Boyar
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The Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa and World War I by Yucel Yigit
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The ‘Bon Pour L’Orient’ Front: Analysis of Russia’s Anticipated Victory over the Ottoman Empire in World War I by Ozan Arslan
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The Waning of Empires: The British, the Ottomans and the Russians in the Caucasus and North Iran, 1917–1921 by Peter Sluggett
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What Color Is Your Shame? Orientalizing ‘Crime Against Humanity’ and Guilt by Mehmet Arisan
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Narrating the Memories of Ermeni Mezalimi by Mustafa Kemal Mirzeler
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Turkish Historiography of the First World War by Omer Turan
This article examines the connections between Orientalism and the construction of the stereotypic image, the ‘terrible Turk.’ It focuses on the major politically motivated texts that were produced during the First World War as war propaganda. These texts portrayed Turks as the enemy of civilization at a time when Britain and later the United States were at war with the Ottoman Empire, which unofficially was known as Turkey in the West. In the years after the First World War, the essentially racist characterizations of Turks in these polemical texts made them undiplomatic and they essentially were forgotten. In recent decades, however, diverse international actors have been recycling these texts in a concerted effort to delegitimize the Republic of Turkey and to ‘otherize’ Turks as ‘genocidal’ for deporting the Armenian population out of eastern Anatolia in 1915. By examining the motives behind both the Armenian and Turkish reframing of the 1915 events as a Turkish genocide campaign against Armenians or an Armenian mezalim [atrocity] against Muslims, the article criticizes both approaches and provides a new framework for mutual understanding between Christians and Muslims.
This study is a preliminary attempt at understanding the correlation between the formation of the Young Turk mindset and the European interventions toward the Ottoman Empire in light of the documents written by the Young Turk generation. The Young Turk movement emerged in the period when the European powers were penetrating into Ottoman geography more strongly than ever. The Young Turks witnessed numerous territorial losses, the rise of nationalist sentiments among the imperial subjects and more importantly, the increasing political dependency of the Ottoman Empire. This article argues that modern Turkey’s nationalism is deeply rooted in ‘siege mentality’ that evolved during the late nineteenth to early twentieth century Ottoman experiences. This ‘siege mentality’ is understood as a conviction among Young Turks that the state was on the eve of an enemy siege and thus engaged in a struggle for its very survival. Consequently, anti-Western reactions and survival anxieties among the Young Turk generation shaped and affected the nascent Turkish nationalist discourse and identity, both as an organic process through the experiences of the Young Turks as well as a social construction.
Based on histories, accounts and articles published after the Balkan Wars, this article argues that, contrary to the commonly accepted thesis, the Balkan Wars did not mark the point at which Turkism became the dominant state ideology. There was in fact no clear-cut and definite shift toward Turkism at this point. Instead there was an increasing awareness of the need for a ‘common soul’ that would unite the population of the empire in the face of dramatic challenges such as the Balkan Wars.1
This article seeks to answer four interrelated questions: What was the organizational nature of the Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa (TM)?; Was it an intelligence organization or a vigilante band?; What was the political and military context within which the organization evolved?; and What was the role of the organization in World War I? I argue that the TM evolved out of the revolutionary guerilla activities in the Balkans and became a special force organization during World War I. It evolved in response to a semi-colonial and collapsing Ottoman state with little military capacity to protect its borders. The TM participated in a number of covert operations to instigate Islamic insurrections in India, Africa, and Russia, and its methods included the killing of Muslim as well as Christian opponents of the CUP government during World War I.
In this article, I argue that during World War I the Imperial Russian High Command underestimated the task of defeating the Ottoman Empire and therefore neglected, quantitatively and qualitatively, the Caucasian Front: the northwestern Black Sea coast; eastern Anatolia; the southwestern Caucasus region; and northwestern Iran. The reason why Russia failed to provide adequate resources for this front was because its leading officials perceived the war as the final hour for the Ottomans, and thus their empire would be dissolved, finally settling the Eastern Question in Russia’s favor. Nevertheless, Russia did not simply wait for the expected Ottoman collapse, but between November 1914 and December 1916, its Caucasian Army launched many military operations along the Caucasian Front. Although the Russian forces achieved several victories, ultimately they fell short of their goals to break Ottoman resistance, conquer eastern Anatolia and dominate northwestern Iran. The unexpected revolution that erupted in March 1917 ended the rule of the Romanov dynasty and also effectively ended Russia’s war efforts against the Ottoman Empire.
During the First World War, Iran, although not a belligerent, was occupied at different times by Russian, British, and Ottoman troops. After a century of Anglo-Russian rivalry in Iran, an Entente between the two powers had been signed in August 1907, essentially dividing the country into a Russian sphere of influence in the north, a British sphere in the south, and a neutral sphere in the middle. As well as effectively ‘betraying’ the supporters of the Iranian constitution, the general effect of the Entente was to give Russia an even freer hand in Iranian politics than had previously been the case, although for a number of reasons, Britain’s considerable interests in Iranian oil (APOC’s oilfields were located in the ‘neutral sphere’) were to have a more lasting impact. The situation in the Caucasus was equally confused, especially after Russia’s invasion of eastern Anatolia. After the fall of the Tsarist government in 1917, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia declared their independence from the Russian state at various times in 1918, while Bolshevik, British, German and Ottoman forces attempted to seize or consolidate territory in Iran and the Caucasus. In 1919, seeking to maintain its authority in Iran while the Bolsheviks were thought to be in no condition to interfere, Britain made an unsuccessful attempt to impose a protectorate. Two years later, with the Protectorate now in abeyance, a Soviet-Iranian Treaty was signed in Moscow on February 26, 1921 a few days after Reza Shah’s seizure of power. Under its terms, the Soviet government ‘forgave’ the loans made to Iran by the Tsarist government, and transferred all Russian assets in Iran to the Soviet government. The paper will try to set out the main parameters of this confused and often confusing chain of events.
This article analyzes the Orientalist discourse of demonization, exclusion and ‘othering’ of the Ottoman Empire and its Muslim population during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by focusing on the writings of three influential men: British Clergyman John Henry (Cardinal) Newman, British political leader William Gladstone, and American ambassador Henry Morgenthau. Even though these figures wrote at different times, their writings about the Ottoman Empire are complementary and form a continuous discourse especially in terms of constructing a specific ground of perceiving the atrocities that occurred during World War One. Although the first two had no great impact like the last one at the time they were written they constituted a great support for the latter in terms of the plausibility of the latter’s arguments. As the latter is accepted as one of the main sources of the alleged genocide of the Ottoman Armenians, the paper reflects the particular writings of these three figures as one single and continuous discourse that have constituted the basic parameters of discussing and thinking about the Armenian genocide.
In the last one hundred years, Western scholars have assembled a deep and varied record documenting Turkish violence aimed at Armenians. This record has prompted some Western scholars and politicians to characterize the World War I deportation of and attacks on Armenians as genocidal. In contrast, narratives preserved by families and in local culture that focus on violent acts committed by Armenians against Muslims (known as Ermeni mezalimi) generally have been ignored. Muslims in Anatolia tell these stories not only because they unite them against their perceived common enemies, but also because they find comfort in stories that emphasize the similarities of their experiences. Their identity as Muslims, so essential to their lives, is articulated in tales of the Ermeni mezalimi. Storytellers use traditional symbolism and other folkloric techniques to delineate problematic past interactions between Muslims and their Christian Armenian neighbors. To guide the audience on this emotional journey, the storytellers use performative arts to suggest that Armenians, with whom their ancestors once lived side-by-side in villages, sharing one another’s neighborly hospitalities, betrayed, in the World War I era, both the Ottoman state and their Muslim neighbors by uniting with their mortal enemies, the Christian Russians. The historical element in these stories is mixed with folklore as well as with the needs and demands of the audience the storytellers encounter in their local environment. While these stories do preserve memories of a traumatic era in eastern Anatolia, because they intertwine history, folklore, and contemporary needs, their value for historical reconstruction is limited.
Turkish historiography on the First World War remained under the shadow of debates about the role of the wartime Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) government for decades. For that reason, Turkish historians preferred to work on the War of Independence (1919–23) under the leadership of Ataturk rather than the First World War. Consequently, there is not a comprehensive Turkish bibliography of the First World War on the 100th anniversary of its commencement, despite the momentous impact of that conflict on Turkey. Nevertheless, one can consult several accounts that military officers wrote after the war, and based on documents in Turkish military archives. While these sources fill an important gap about military operations, they are generally descriptive narratives with scant or no analyses. In addition, there also are many memoirs that provide valuable information about some of the issues that are neglected in the military accounts. In the last decade, several researchers have begun to examine many of the previously ignored topics pertaining to events in Anatolia during the war. Even though there still is no Turkish text that provides a comprehensive account of all the intertwined diplomatic, economic, political, military, and social dimensions of the First World War, these recent works give hope that such a long-needed book is on the horizon.
