Introduction

Author(s):  
Tsolin Nalbantian

The Introduction contextualizes the Armenian population in Lebanon. It distinguishes between Armenians who lived in Lebanon prior to the division of the Ottoman Empire, in the wake of the Armenian Genocide, and after the establishment of French and British mandatory rule in the Levant. In addition, it outlines the ecclesiastic, class, linguistic, and political gamut of the Armenian population in Lebanon. It analyzes how Armenians organized themselves according to the villages and centers in the Ottoman Empire that they hailed from and reformed their political ideologies, affiliations, and ecclesiastic connections resulting in the establishment of mini-enclaves within Armenian-populated neighborhoods in Lebanon. The introduction also positions the book within four fields: histories of Armenians, Lebanon, the Cold War in the Middle East, and the Diaspora Studies. The innovation of linking these fields together through the themes of identification, belonging, and articulating citizenship produces fresh readings of the time period. This intervention draws attention to experiences that established scholarship does not adequately tackle, increasing the possible ways and methods to study and approach the region, its inhabitants, and historical time frame.

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-30
Author(s):  
Edita Gzoyan

Abstract Genocide perpetrated against the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire was both gender-oriented and age-oriented. The Armenian male population was generally killed before or at the beginning of deportation, while women and children, as well as being massacred, were also subjected to different forms of physical and sexual violence during the death marches. Children were also forcibly transfered to the enemy group, while women were abducted or forcibly married. The experiences and fates of Armenian women and children offer a perspective on how complex and multi-faceted the phenomenon of genocide is. Based on the surveys of rescued Armenian women kept in the archives of the League of Nations, this article will present the fate of women during and after the Armenian Genocide.


2004 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 612-635 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Tures

The Middle East has witnessed a recent spate of alterations in rulers and regimes. These new leaders are coming to power in countries having a history of international conflict with other states in the region. Will the change in government exacerbate interstate crises, producing disputes and wars? Or will the nascent leadership steer their countries to peace, choosing instead to focus on an internal consolidation of power? To answer this question, this article examines the theories of foreign policy behavior of new leaders. It discusses the results of a quantitative analysis of an earlier time frame: the initial years of the Cold War. The article then conducts a series of case study analyses of contemporary times to determine if the theory and prior statistical tests remain valid. The results show that new administrations are more likely to target rivals with a threat, display, or limited use of force. Such incoming leaders, however, seem reluctant to drag their countries into a full-scale war. These findings hold for a variety of countries in a number of different contexts. Such results are relevant for Middle East scholars, conflict mediators, as well as American foreign policymakers who seem to have adopted a taste for regime change in the region.


Author(s):  
Tsolin Nalbantian

The conclusion returns to the need to reexamine the history of Lebanon and its Armenian population. To understand Lebanon in the years following independence one must engage deeply with their Armenian inhabitants and explore how they fashioned and refashioned belonging in the everyday in a variety of spheres: social, religious, cultural, and political. To understand Armenians one does not have to consider them as part of a larger diaspora, but rather as active local inhabitants engaged in layered power struggles. To grasp the complexity of the Cold War in the Middle East, one must examine not only how American and Soviet powers and state proxies engaged with one another, but also how this environment was used and manipulated by societal actors. Taken together, all this demonstrates not only the importance of studying Armenians in Lebanon but also the very necessity of doing so. Armenians Beyond Diaspora pushes Armenians from the margins into the center, not to insert them artificially into a larger history that has already been written, but into a space that calls for additional explorations of marginal populations, power struggles, changing notions of belonging, and the adaptability of the nation.


Author(s):  
Robert Tatoyan

This paper aims to present and analyze data provided by censuses of the Ottoman Armenians from Van, Erzeroum and Bitlis provinces, who, fleeing the threat of massacre during WWI, found refuge in the territory of the Russian Empire, particularly in the Russian Transcaucasia. By comparing data on the Armenian refugees with information provided by other statistical sources, particularly the Armenian patriarchate and the Ottoman government, it is possible to enrich our knowledge of the numbers of Armenian population in Western Armenia and the Ottoman Empire in general on the eve of WWI and the Armenian Genocide. It is shown that the number of refugees is about 70% higher than the number of the Armenian population for the same areas before WWI mentioned in the official Ottoman statistics and corresponds approximately to the figures of the Armenian patriarchate. If account is taken that some people were already dead by the time the refugee censuses were carried out and also that the populations of some settlements within the administrative units in question were not evacuated at all but massacred, then the actual number of the Armenian population in these areas was even higher.


2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vahakn N. Dadrian

The wartime fate of the Ottoman Empire's Armenian minority continues to be controversial. The debate in the main revolves around the causes and nature of that fate. Some historians have alleged that what is involved is centrally organized mass murder—or, to use contemporary terminology, genocide. This school of thought maintains that the Ottoman authorities were waiting for a suitable opportunity to undertake the wholesale liquidation of the empire's Armenian population, and the outbreak of World War I provided that opportunity. The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, or Unionists), who controlled the Ottoman government, they argue further, did in fact undertake this liquidation under cover of the war.1 Others, however, dispute these assertions, especially that of genocidal intent. This group maintains that Armenian acts of disloyalty, subversion, and insurrection in wartime forced the central government to order, for purposes of relocation, the deportation of large sections of the Armenian population. According to this argument, apart from those who were killed in “intercommunal” clashes—that is, a “civil war”—the bulk of the Armenian losses resulted from the severe hardships associated with poorly administered measures of deportations, including exhaustion, sickness, starvation, and epidemics. In other words, this school of thought holds that the Ottoman Empire, in the throes of an existential war, had no choice but to protect itself by resorting to drastic methods; therefore, the tragic fate of the Armenians must be understood in the context of the dire conditions of World War I.2 These views are encapsulated in the formula that the noted Middle East historian Bernard Lewis has used—namely, the desperate conditions of “an embattled empire.”3


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-311
Author(s):  
Deniz Yonucu ◽  
Talin Suciyan

Abstract The author of The Armenians in Modern Turkey, historian Talin Suciyan, puts the Armenian genocide survivors at the center of her research to provide a new perspective on the history of the Turkish Republic. Suciyan analyzes the experiences and lives of its Armenian population several decades after the genocide. In this interview, Deniz Yonucu speaks with Suciyan on her research and innovative anthrohistorical approach to understanding the paths that led to the annihilation of Armenians, the effects of the genocide in modern Turkey, and the importance of focusing attention on the experiences of survivors after catastrophic experiences of genocides. The survivor as described in this interview is neither a wretched of the earth, who is forced to live a tortured life, nor a subaltern whose voice cannot acquire speech. The survivor instead is an existence whose past, present and future is constantly denied, and therefore robbed from her.


Author(s):  
Armen Marukyan

In genocide studies, for a more comprehensive, objective study of genocide committed against victim groups, the method of comparative analysis is used, which allows to identify both similarities and features between different examples of this crime. In the framework of the article, a comparative analysis of the stages and methods of the Armenian-Tutsi genocides was made. The choice of the Rwandan genocide as a subject of comparison with the Armenian Genocide is due to the fact that, unlike the organizers of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire, who were convicted by Turkish military tribunals, the organizers of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda were prosecuted by the International Tribunal, created by the UN Security Council in 1994. Revealing the similarities between the stages and methods of committing two identical crimes will provide an opportunity to reveal the precedent of condemning the Rwandan Genocide in the International Tribunal and the possibilities of applying it to the Armenian Genocide case in the future in an international court. As a result of the comparative analysis of the stages of the two genocides, the methods of implementation, in addition to many similarities, significant differences were registered, from which we have separated the following: 1. In order to end the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish authorities chose the period of World War II, when influential world politicians were engaged in hostilities on different fronts of the war and they would not be able to intervene and prevent its implementation, while the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda took place during the civil war that broke out in this country. 2. If the Russian Caucasus Army was an obstacle to the criminal policy of genocide of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, which during the hostilities on the RussianTurkish front with the support of Armenian volunteer units occupied the provinces of Erzurum, Van, Bitlis in Western Armenia, as well as Trabzon. The complete extermination of the Tutsis in Rwanda was halted by the advance of their military formation, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RWF), which managed to enter the capital, Kigali, to end the Houthi regime's criminal policy against the Tutsis. Unlike the RSF, the Armenian volunteer detachments in the Russian Caucasus Army did not act independently, they were not a military force capable of stopping the genocidal policy of the Ottoman Empire against the Armenian population. 3. The presence of the Russian Caucasus Army in some parts of Western Armenia, which was to some extent a guarantee of security for the genocidal Armenian population, as well as the Russian-Turkish front line, only temporarily stopped the continuation of the criminal policy of the Turkish authorities towards Armenians. During the revolutionary upheavals in Russia in 1917, the Russian Caucasian army was demoralized and disbanded, after which the Turkish authorities were able to continue the policy of the Armenian Genocide not only in the territories of Western Armenia formerly controlled by Russian troops, but also in Eastern Armenia and the Caucasus. The same can be said about Cilicia, when after the departure of the French troops, the Kemalists had the opportunity to continue the policy of genocide against the Armenians of Cilicia.


Author(s):  
Taner Akçam

Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects. This book goes deep inside the bureaucratic machinery of Ottoman Turkey to show how a dying empire embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing. Although the deportation and killing of Armenians was internationally condemned in 1915 as a “crime against humanity and civilization,” the Ottoman government initiated a policy of denial that is still maintained by the Turkish Republic. The case for Turkey's “official history” rests on documents from the Ottoman imperial archives, to which access has been heavily restricted until recently. It is this very source that the book now uses to overturn the official narrative. The documents presented here attest to a late-Ottoman policy of Turkification, the goal of which was no less than the radical demographic transformation of Anatolia. To that end, about one-third of Anatolia's 15 million people were displaced, deported, expelled, or massacred, destroying the ethno-religious diversity of an ancient cultural crossroads of East and West, and paving the way for the Turkish Republic. By uncovering the central roles played by demographic engineering and assimilation in the Armenian Genocide, this book will fundamentally change how this crime is understood and show that physical destruction is not the only aspect of the genocidal process.


Author(s):  
Jesse Ferris

This book draws on declassified documents from six countries and original material in Arabic, German, Hebrew, and Russian to present a new understanding of Egypt's disastrous five-year intervention in Yemen, which Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser later referred to as “my Vietnam.” The book argues that Nasser's attempt to export the Egyptian revolution to Yemen played a decisive role in destabilizing Egypt's relations with the Cold War powers, tarnishing its image in the Arab world, ruining its economy, and driving its rulers to instigate the fatal series of missteps that led to war with Israel in 1967. Viewing the Six Day War as an unintended consequence of the Saudi–Egyptian struggle over Yemen, the book demonstrates that the most important Cold War conflict in the Middle East was not the clash between Israel and its neighbors. It was the inter-Arab struggle between monarchies and republics over power and legitimacy. Egypt's defeat in the “Arab Cold War” set the stage for the rise of Saudi Arabia and political Islam. Bold and provocative, this book brings to life a critical phase in the modern history of the Middle East. Its compelling analysis of Egypt's fall from power in the 1960s offers new insights into the decline of Arab nationalism, exposing the deep historical roots of the Arab Spring of 2011.


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