Article 12: Gendered Experiences in the Armenian Genocide
by Amy Jackson
1914 was a tumultuous year for all of Europe as the First World War was being waged. While the eyes of the world were on those engaging in hostilities, the Ottoman Empire was engaging in a secret war of their own. The Ottoman mobilized in the First World War, while simultaneously launching a campaign against its own civilians. This marked the beginning of the Armenian genocide. Prior to 1914, the Armenian population was not unfamiliar to persecution. Early attempts of working ethnic cleansing targeting Armenians had taken place throughout the nineteenth century. This systemic discrimination against the Armenians grew into the early 20th century, building to the Genocide in 1915. The first phase of the genocide was carried out through the conscripting, brutalizing and murdering of Armenian men. When the state determined the Armenian population had been substantially weakened, those remaining were gathered into public spaces, and declarations were issued that they were to be deported into the desert. Women and children were banished into the desert to potentially walk hundreds of miles to reach their destination–many of whom never did. Throughout the Armenian Genocide, men were targeted as defenders of the nation, and as a result were the first to be annihilated. Then, women were targeted as carriers of the future of the nation, and as such were subjected to exile, sexual slavery, or forced marriage if not outright murdered. Children who did not die in the exile, or those left behind, were placed with Muslim families for assimilation purposes, sold into slavery (domestic or sexual) or executed by drowning. Today, the Turkish state refuses to acknowledge the genocide completely, as it is left out of historical narratives. The voices of those who fell victim to the genocide are still silenced today. The Armenian Genocide was an attempt to exterminate and then assimilate the nation as a whole. In its endeavours to do so, the Ottoman based its violent strategies in gendered attacks. As a result, the experiences of men, women, boys and girls varied as they were targeted according to their gender.
During the early 20th century, both Europe and the Ottoman Empire were in a state of political strain. The First World War was becoming more heated and Ottoman state was looking to build alliances with other nations to gain stability. The once powerful status of the Ottoman Empire was crumbling following a number of wars it had lost with neighbouring Baltic States, as well as a deterioration of internal political affairs. To preserve its powerful status, the Ottoman sought to strengthen itself. In doing so, the empire began a unification campaign, and at the heart of the campaigns ideology, the Armenian population were enemies. This was not the first time Armenians were determined as a problem in the Ottoman Empire. In the 19th century, Armenians had fallen victim to an ethnic cleansing attempt. Donald Miller points out,
From 1894 to 1896, more than one hundred thousand Armenians were killed. These massacres were often carried out by irregular Kurdish troops who had been armed by the government with sophisticated repeating rifles. They were encouraged to loot and kill Armenians, while regular Turkish troops stood by and observed.
This initial attempt of ethnic cleansing was the result of competition for land with Muslim Kurds who had the support of the state. The state gave Kurds authority to persecute the Armenians, and mobilized them with weapons resulting in massacres. Hillary Kaiser elaborates on this event,
The government created the Kurdish ‘Hamidieh’ cavalry in 1890. … Throughout 1895 and 1896, Hamidiehs and Muslim villagers and townsmen massacred Armenians, plundering property, seizing land, and abducting women. The government furthered the weakening of Armenian communities by deporting survivors from Sassun, making room for more Muslim settlers.
The persecution of the Armenians in 1915 was a result of continued discrimination that carried on through the 19th century, and into the 20th century.
Throughout the early 20th century, the states tension toward the Armenian population carried on. Michelle Tusan explains in details,
Some two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman lands, most of them were peasants and townspeople in the six provinces of eastern Anatolia. In an Anatolian population estimated to be between fifteen and seventeen and one-half million inhabitants, Armenians were outnumbered by their Muslim neighbours in most locations, though they often lived in homogeneous villages, sections of towns, and occasionally dominated larger rural and urban areas. The most influential and prosperous Armenians lived in the imperial capital, Istanbul (Constantinople), where their visibility made them the target of both official and popular resentment from many Muslims.
The main differences between the Armenians and Turk majority were found in the religious beliefs of each respective group. For the Armenians, Christianity largely informed their way of living and culture. As Donald Miller states, “Religion has also played a crucial role in maintaining a distinctive national and ethnic consciousness. Armenians take considerable pride in having been the first nation to accept Christianity.” Religion and social alienation of the population in the Ottoman both contributed to the strong sense of Armenian identity. Donald Miller offers an analysis for this phenomenon,
If it were not for their language and religion, Armenians would have vanished from Turkey long before the attempted extermination in 1915. Central prohibitions against intermarriage with Muslims, as well as the preservation of Armenian culture through language, contributed significantly to maintaining a separate Armenian identity.
In the unification process aimed to Turkify the Ottoman Empire, the thriving Armenian population presented a threat to the Empire. Amy E. Randall explains how this process became a conduit for discrimination against Armenians:
The waning of power of the Ottoman Empire fostered anxiety and fear among top political leaders and others about the empire’s self identity and future as a great power. Thus began the attempts of a nationwide unification and a new wave of nationalism that was built on the persecution of Armenians who were pitted as the ‘other’.
The campaign against Armenians took place through subtle changes that grew more dramatic over time. The first steps toward creating an ethnically pure empire began with the prohibition of Armenian cultural life. Randall expands on this process,
Othering became a visible state policy. Armenian’s names had to be changed to Turkish names, properties were confiscated, all business transactions had to happen formally in the Turkish language, and all Armenians had to turn in their personal weapons. From 1913 onward, Christian traditions were forbidden in public life, and the only language allowed in schools was Turkish. These were major changes, especially in small towns in the southeast Anatolia where the Christian population was often a majority.
With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the focus of the world was on mobilizing for war. While mobilizing their own military to enter into hostilities, the Ottoman simultaneously threw away all discretion and launched a campaign against its Armenian population. Initiating this movement was the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the political body in power at the time. Adam Jones records,
As early as December 1914 or January 1915, a special conference of the CUP issued a ‘strictly confidential’ document ordering its agents to ‘close all Armenian Societies, and arrest all who worked against the Government at any time among them and send them into the provinces such as Baghdad or Mosul, and ‘wipe them out either on the road or there.’ Measures were to be implemented ‘to exterminate all males under 50, priests and teachers, leaving girls and children to be Islamize, while also ‘killing off’ all Armenians in the army. This was essentially a blueprint for the genocide that followed.
These measures were initiated in the early spring beginning with the extermination of Armenian men.
The first phase of this annihilation included silencing the voices of influential and educated Armenians. As Selina L. Mangassarian points out, “The Turks targeted the Armenian intelligentsia first, and executed them. Then, they destroyed churches, schools, and educational centers, and collected any weapons that Armenians could use to defend themselves.” The Ottoman also demobilized all Armenian soldiers who did not perish on the front lines of battle- placing them into labour camps. Michelle Tusan breaks down the initial stages of genocidal violence:
It was in this context of desperation and defeat that, beginning in the first months of 1915, the Ottoman authorities demobilized Armenian soldiers from the Ottoman Army, at first organizing them into work brigades and then forcing them to dig their own graves before being shot. … To prevent any further organized resistance by the Armenians, the Ottoman government rounded up the leading Armenian intellectuals, political leaders, and even members of the Ottoman parliament in Istanbul and exiled them from the capital on April 24, the date that later would be commemorated as genocide day. Most of them perished at the hands of the authorities.
This phase proved to be successful in devastating the Armenian community.
The next phase followed quickly in order to thwart any opportunities for Armenians to regroup or organize. Vahakn Dadrain explains how this population cut eased the second phase into effect,
The relentless liquidation of an estimated 90% of the able-bodied males of these provinces was effectively carried out in the spring and summer of 1915 by General Mahmud Kaˆmil, commander-in-chief of the Third Army. The rest of the population was to be liquidated indirectly, i.e. through exhausting and endless deportation treks.
Following the initial blow, the Ottoman gave permission to state or military officials to deport anyone deemed a threat- thus beginning the exile of thousands of Armenians. The first step of the exile began with the demolishing of property rights of Armenians. As Hillary Kaiser reports,
On 10 June 1915, the Ministry of Interior regulated the liquidation of Armenian property. All property had to be registered while perishable goods and livestock were to be auctioned off immediately …. Non-distributed real estate was to be auctioned off. In sum, Armenian owners had lost their property rights and could not object.
With loss of all property, the remaining population had no places of refuge to turn to. Those remaining, were instructed to grab any goods they can carry as they would be forced into the desert. Michelle Tusan observes “Soon Armenians throughout the country were forced to gather what belongings they could carry or transport and leave their homes at short notice.” Forced to walk for hundreds of miles through the desert without adequate supplies for survival, these banishments into the desert resulted in high mortality rates. These mass deportations of Armenians were named death marches. According to Adam Jones, this was expected to further the Armenian death toll, “The Armenian population was led away on foot- or in some cases dispatched by train- to the wastelands of the Deir el-Zoe desert in distant Syria, in conditions calculated to kill tens of thousands en route.”
The deportation of and exile is where the targeting of Armenians shift. Until the exile, the initial stages of the genocide directly targeted men; before the death marches were carried out, the remainder were abducted and executed. Hillary Kaiser writes, “The government escorts, mostly gendarmes or local militia, usually separated most of the men from the caravans during the first days of the deportation. The men and boys were then taken away and killed.” The phase of exile marks the shift of direct attack from men to a more indirect attack on women and children. Donald Miller shares of struggles women faced in this time writing, “Women whose husbands were in prison or had already been killed took the full responsibility for preparing their families for the deportation. They had to pack whatever family belongings could be carried, prepare food for the journey, and arrange for carts or other transportation.” Throughout the exile of Armenians, women frequently perished from environmental exposure, starvation or a number of abuses at the hands of officers. Randall writes,
As described in connection with the atrocities committed in Trabzon, rape in all forms was one of the most common by-products of the Armenian genocide. As Turkish lieutenant Hasan Maruf admitted to his British captors, “cases of rape of women and girls, even publicly, are very numerous.
Armenian women, who made up the bulk of the desert caravans, were exposed to a number of sufferings. Those who survived the systematic rape, disease, and violence were also at risk to be taken away from caravans and taken to cities to become brides for Muslim men. Hilary Kaiser states,
In the camps, the Ottoman authorities exposed them to contagious diseases like typhus which killed hundreds daily. Refusal to provide water and food increased the high mortality among the emaciated victims. Here as well, Muslims were eager to obtain Armenian women.
Throughout the genocide, the cases of men and women both demonstrate the gendered approach of the Armenian genocide. This gendered dichotomy was also evident in the approach of the state in the treatment of Armenian boys and girls.
In many cases, deported parents were forced to leave children they were no longer able to care for behind. The Ottoman did not foresee this issue and were surprised to find thousands of children were left behind to fend for themselves. These children who were left behind were susceptible to abduction, violence and execution. Amy Randall writes of the disturbing cases of child execution by Turkish doctors stating,
Two Turkish MDs, Dr. Ziyat Fuad, Inspector of Health Services, and Dr. Adnan, the city’s Health Services Director, testified based on evidence gathered from local Turkish physicians that Dr. Ali Saib, Director of Public Health of Trabzon province, systematically poisoned Armenian infants brought to the city’s Red Crescent Hospital and ordered the drowning at the nearby Black Sea of those who resisted taking his “medicine.” Another method Dr. Saib applied in a house full of Armenian infants was “the steam bath.” Through the installation there of an army contraption, babies were exposed to suffocating hot steam and thereby instantly killed. Father Laurent, the French Capuchin Father Superior in Trabzon, testified through an interpreter that he personally saw the corpses of the dead poisoned children being squeezed into large, deep baskets on the hospital grounds, like animals from a slaughterhouse, then dumped into the nearby sea.
Mass drownings of both Armenian girls and boys who were orphaned became a common practice in the genocide. From Randall’s research on the genocide, we know,
The same police chief on October 24, 1916 ordered some 2,000 Armenian orphans carried to the banks of the Euphrates, hands and feet bound. They were then thrown into the river two by two to the visible enjoyment of the police chief who took special pleasure at the sight of the drama of drowning.
Like that of Armenian men and women, the experiences of Armenian boys and girls varied. Both boys and girls were subjected to abduction and execution, however, the strategic attacks on both boys and girls was gendered. While boys were typically placed with Muslim family for assimilation purposes or Turkification, girls were more often taken for the purposes of becoming sexual slaves. Amy Randall’s research examines this phenomenon:
Slavery and forced assimilation were gender based. The Armenian boys who were taken into Turkish households were often considered ‘young enough’ to still be converted to Islam, while Armenian females were often, but not always, used as sex slaves… Not only were the subjects forced into strange households, they were forced to become Turkified, and in many cases this Turkification process involved sexual subordination.
Children were also subjected to being stolen while found in the large convoys crossing the desert. The fate of these children was to be determined by those who bought or sold them. Randall writes,
While the ‘adopted’ Armenian boys were used for labour and often forced to convert to Islam, females were often used as slaves and distributed to local populations in a wide network of ‘markets’. Outside of Mersey, for instance, Armenian women and children were driven into a camp that also served as a slave market.
Ultimately, the Armenian boys and girls were dehumanized and made into a commodity and sold. This is what Adam Jones writes,
One young male survivor described his group being gathered together in a field while word went out to the local population: ‘whoever wants a woman or child, come and get them.’ ‘Albert said that people came and took whomever they wanted, comparing the scene to sheep being sold at an auction.
This commodification was particularly evident in the sexual slavery disproportionately experienced by young girls. Girls who were considered pretty were not only sold into slavery, but they also fell prey to abusive Turkish forces. Amy E. Randall gives examples, , “Another venue for rape on a massive scale was the use and misuse of Armenian churches as temporary brothels. Young Armenian girls were assembled and made available to Turkish officers and soldiers.” Unfortunately, even those taken as slaves were not exempt from execution. These young girls were treated disposed of by officers as though they were not human. Randall writes,
According to the testimony of an Armenian survivor, Mustafa Sidki, Deir Zor’s police chief, on August 10, 1916 selected the prettiest girls from a convoy of deportees. They were taken to a bridge on the Euphrates where the police chief and his accomplices raped them. The victims were then all thrown into the river to be drowned.
The experiences of the Armenian population who were subjected to the genocide varied depending on gender. The gendered approach also intersected with age. The Ottoman Empire persecuted the Armenians depending on whether the target was a man, woman, boy or girl. It is evident in research that the first phase of the genocide was carried out through the extermination of Armenian men. The second phase brought the alienation of women and children through the exile into the desert. Lastly, the final phase included full assimilation of survivors through marriage, rape and adoption. The first phase target men who were considered to be the defense of the Armenian nation. Adam Jones summarizes these processes as such,
The opening phase of the assault consisted of a gender identity against Armenian males. Like the opening eliticide, this was aimed at stripping the Armenian community of those who might mobilize to defend it. …By July 1915, some 200,000 Armenian men had been murdered, reducing the remaining community to a condition of near-total helplessness, thus an easy prey for destruction.
Boys who escaped the executions dealt by the state, were often taken from exiled families in desert caravans and brought into Muslim homes to be assimilated.
The first phase weakened the Armenian community. With the second phase came the liquidation of Armenian assets and banishment where women and girls were targeted to be exiled, bought or married off. The experiences of both genders were different. The women of the Armenian genocide were targeted not as defenders like their male counterparts, but as those who are responsible for the preservation of the culture. Should the Armenian girls and women be subjected to conversion and assimilation through marriage, the birth of Muslim children would ultimately end their Armenian line. Amy E. Randall explains this genocidal practice,
Virgins were young and considered influential and malleable. Females were seen as gatekeepers, mothers and cultural representatives. Forcing the Armenian females to reproduce with the Turks was a way not only to subordinate but also to eliminate the Armenian culture through sexual acts. The goal was to cleanse the Ottoman political, national and civic body as well as the public space of Armenian culture, and to cleanse the Armenian populace of its Armenianess from within.
When the genocide and deportations came to a halt, the rebuilding process of the Armenians, rested in the children and women who were still alive. A surge of state and Christian orphanages were established in towns and cities to take in remaining women and children in the desert caravans, and local children who had become orphans throughout the genocide. Ug ur Ümit Üngör writes,
During and after the war the identity and future of Ottoman orphans became a battleground between relief organizations and missionaries, on the one hand, and the Young Turk regime, on the other. From the Young Turks’ nationalist perspective, children constituted a precious form of national property, and were to be instilled with nationalist ideas and given a purely Turkish identity. Non-Turkish orphans would be subjected to differential treatment: in addition to food and shelter, they would receive a transformation of cultural identity.
The state attempted to intervene in the foreign rescue of Armenian children through continuing the process of assimilation through the use of boarding schools. Vahakn Dadrian writes of the state’s methods in overseeing this process:
Accordingly, whenever possible, Muslim Turks, and orphanages run by governmentally appointed Turks, were encouraged to collect multitudes of Armenian orphans, mostly male, and to raise them as Turks after some nominal rituals of conversion to Islam, including serial circumcisions and name changes.
These boarding schools for orphans were utilized tactics the state believed to be effective. The separation from family meant a breaking of any cultural identity thus garnering a state wide support for their works. Watenpaugh writes, “This was accomplished through forms of coercion and unremitting physical abuse- Children were given Muslim names, falsified birth records, the speaking and reading of Armenian were grounds for beatings, and no attempts were made to reunify children with living relatives.” For the children, the state continued working towards its unification endeavours through assimilation.
Following the end of the genocide, the survivors had no home to return to. Therefore, the orphanages established by private charities did what they could to help women who survived. The women, who are considered the carriers of the Armenian ethnicity, continued to face social alienation in the country. Because of this social alienation, many Armenian women stayed in their new Muslim homes or turned to prostitution. Vahe Tachijian obtained information on majority of the women who lost their families,
On the other hand, a majority of the women had lost their husbands and other family members; many had been raped, and all their possessions had been stolen from them during the deportations. They had endured famine and occasionally given birth to illegitimate children. The group of women who had undergone these terrible experiences were often shunned by the other refugees as well. This was one reason that, simply in order to survive, some of them became prostitutes in large towns such as Aleppo, Damascus, Baghdad or Mosul. Others, kidnapped by Muslims and forcibly married, had given birth to children; after the War, they continued to live in their new homes.
Ultimately, it is unknown just how many victims died in the Armenian Genocide. There are no accurate numbers as much documentation containing numbers of people in death marches or executions had been destroyed. Michelle Tusan estimates these numbers in her work stating, “By the end of the war ninety percent of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire were gone, a culture and civilization wiped out never to return. It is conservatively estimated that between 600,000 to over 1,000,000 were slaughtered or died on the marches.” The experiences of those who did survive are still silenced to this day. The period of the Armenian genocide has been completely left out of the national narrative of Turkey. Although the Ottoman Empire crumbled, Turkey still remains, and the state continues to ignore the genocide all together. The refusal to acknowledge the genocide stems partly from the state’s ability to hide any formal responsibility for the genocide as much of the documentation was instructed to be destroyed. Taner Akçam elaborates on this state wide regulation:
The evidence of incineration and other methods of destroying documents is not, however, limited to extractions from Istanbul courtroom interrogations and commissions of inquiry. The Prime Ministerial Ottoman Archive also holds a number of Interior Ministry communications that recipients were instructed to burn after reading.
The importance of studying the experiences of different genders is important to understand and recognize how war impacts men and women differently. In the Armenian Genocide, women, men, boys and girls were targeted based on their gender. When looking through the lens of gendered experiences, the method of victimization explains how and why genders are targeted differently in war and genocide.
Bibliography
Akçam, Taner. 2012. The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity : The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the
Ottoman Empire. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012.
Dadrian, V. N. “Children as victims of genocide: the Armenian case.” JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH, 2003., 42
Jones, Adam. 2011. Genocide: a comprehensive introduction. n.p.: London ; New York : Routledge, c2011. 2011.
Miller, Donald E., and Lorna Touryan Miller. 1993. Survivors: An Oral History Of The Armenian Genocide. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993.
Moses, A. Dirk, and Donald Bloxham. 2010. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Randall, Amy E. Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
Suny, Ronald G. 2016. ““They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: Explaining the Armenian Genocide One Hundred
Years Later.” Juniata Voices 16, 208-229.
TACHJIAN, VAH. 2009. “Gender, nationalism, exclusion: the reintegration process of female Survivors of the Armenian genocide.”
Nations & Nationalism 15, no. 1: 60-80.
Tusan, Michelle. 2014. ““Crimes against Humanity”: Human Rights, the British Empire, and the Origins of the Response to the
Armenian Genocide.” American Historical Review 119, no. 1: 47.
Üngör, Uğur Ümit. 2012. “Orphans, Converts, and Prostitutes: Social Consequences of War and Persecution in the Ottoman
Empire, 1914–1923.” War in History 19, no. 2: 173-192.
Watenpaugh, Keith David. 2013. ““Are There Any Children for Sale?” Genocide and the Transfer of Armenian Children
(1915–1922).” Journal of Human Rights 12, no. 3: 283-295.
Disclaimer: Readers should be aware that due to formatting constraints, quoted sources in this article could not be included in footnotes and endnotes. Readers should please consult the bibliography section of the article. Inquires may be directed to the author.
About the Author: Amy Jackson was raised on Opaskwayak Cree Nation and is currently residing in The Pas. After spending years involved in federal and provincial politics and performing with different music projects, she has decided to pursue post-secondary education. Amy is heading into her third year of the Bachelor of Arts program with a major in History and minor in Social Science. When she is not at school, she is either playing fiddle, travelling, or both!
Instructor’s Remarks: The third-year History course “Women and the World Wars” explored various biographies and scholarly works discussing the roles women played in these terrible conflicts. The course also examined how these conflicts shaped and affected women the world over. As a dedicated student and contributor to the discussions in the course Amy Jackson then explored the often overlooked Armenian Genocide during the First World War. She studied a diverse collection of scholarly material that was by its very nature disturbing and unsettling and came to understand the particular impacts these atrocities had on the women who found themselves in this incomprehensible maelstrom. She has produced an insightful paper that sheds important light on a topic few people in Canada know anything about. (Dr. Greg Stott)